Instability and riots by Miquel Roca i Junyent, father of Constitution and former Spanish and Catalan politician of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya

MIQUEL ROCA JUNYENT, BARCELONA
11/19/2019 06:28

Are we getting used to instability? In any case, it is clear that it is no longer the subject of the same comments as a few days or a few weeks ago. It could be said that the stoppage of government action, both in Catalonia and throughout Spain, causes less concern than road blocks or occupancy of train tracks or highways, or container fires. What is now presented by some as a natural extension of the exercise of freedom of demonstration and is defined as simple riots worries and unsettles many citizens more than those problems which make stable and stabilizing government action difficult.

Many people believe that these riots – as many media define them – do not matter. Some political leaders must even be subject to a prohibition from calling them violent acts and, perhaps for that reason, do not believe it necessary to condemn them. They just say that these facts do not help the best international understanding of the pro-sovereignty cause, forgetting that everything that does not help is usually harmful. And the riots hurt, outside and inside the house, everywhere. Because riots respond more to ideological anti-systemic proposals than to a claim shared by Catalan society. Thus – if someone pretends it – the social base is not extended; on the contrary: it gets thinner.

With the shouting and the fire we will only be able to further burn the situation and that the voice of understanding is not heard

Trivializing the violence of riots or the violent disturbances, as you wish, can be a very dangerous precedent. Is anyone really defending that freedom of demonstration incorporates riots as an implicit consequence? Is anyone really saying this? This is very serious and it harms any cause claimed as democratic. And, even more and worse, the same type of exercise would be legitimized in demonstrations of the opposite sign. Many dramas have begun from here historically, and Catalonia has always lost.

We must be able to drive attention and concern towards overcoming this present instability. Temporariness is stretched and it does not favor the adoption of the essential measures to face the challenges raised by this moment. Dialogue means governing; economic re-launching measures means governing; fighting inequality means governing. And governing means telling enough of riots. This is such a well-known lesson that it should not be explained too much, there would be enough to read what happened and what happens in the world when instability coexists with economic, social and political crises. Nothing good.

Perhaps it would be necessary or, in any case, convenient that for a few days politics would not be exhausted in statements aimed at fueling instability, replacing words with facts acting as a bridge between each other, to pragmatically build a climate of respect and tolerance for the ideas of others. It is not easy; nor will it be. But with the shouting and the fire, the only thing we will achieve is to set the situation more on fire and make the screaming not let us hear the voice of understanding.

But the recommendations, curiously, go in a very contradictory line to the one proposed for the situation here. And what we do know is that instability riding on the scene of violent disturbances is not the solution.