Spain, between Catalan secessionism, intolerance and something darker

A few hours before the arrest in Catalonia of a singer accused of making fun of the monarchy, a young girl dressed in blue in a cemetery in Madrid confirmed with military tones the Francoist brigade which fought alongside Hitler’s troops. While insulting the Jewish people, his “comrades” raised their arms in a perfect Nazi choreography. In another corner of this panorama, an already minority sector of Catalan citizenship repeated the government last Sunday in an election that won, in its own way, the xenophobic and medievalist extreme right of the Vox party which went from zero with 11 regional seats. Parliament.

The arrested artist, rapper Pablo Hasél, was sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting King Emeritus Juan Carlos, who in recent years he went out of his way and excessively to be questioned and cursed. The arrest and conviction, a sanction more typical of other borders, would seem compatible with these winds which would signal an extreme turn in the peninsula. Hasél, a provocateur, for many unpleasant, even if it is their right, it is the first musician imprisoned in Spain since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. His arrest sparked a wave of violence in the country.

The entire episode indicates that tapes were performed that should not be violated. And this happens when running a government made up of a socialist party, which is that of the founding history of Spanish modernity, and an organization, Podemos, of a populist and explosive left-wing narrative. But beware, this is not just a Spanish problem.

The idea, championed by many analysts and academics, that there would be an auspicious reversal of authoritarian fashions that have pervaded the world over the past decade, seems to find its limits. It is also the most recent idea, concerning the coronavirus pandemic, which means that the moderation of societies is based on more predictable or more efficient governments than on the bet of adventurers.

The withdrawal of Alernative für Deutschland (AFD), the ultras cousins ​​of Vox in Bavaria, now the second largest political force in Germany, or the withdrawal until recently of the sovereignist Matteo Salvini in Italy, seemed to confirm this vision. Angela Merkel, the hardline adjustment leader in the 2000s, has become different and even more necessary in the face of illness. Joe Biden’s victory, seen from the size of the popular vote that elected him, also responded to this need for more coherent directions after the decline of Donald Trump’s career.

Social debt

Some of these beneficial effects persist. But the problem is that the social debt has only increased undermining confidence in the present and the future and in particular in political leadership. And that’s where you have to look to understand what is happening today.

History provides some mirrors. The concentration of income that was produced by the global convulsions of almost three decades ago has been the factor of a radical change on the planet which has generated, among other consequences, Extremist political alternatives and the spread of populism to the right or to the left. This phenomenon is the one that now floats worryingly, multiplied by the crisis associated with the disease.

Closely linked to this scenario is Trump’s political survival, just overcoming his second indictment. The former president continues to channel the frustration of a huge legion of Americans that this is the same process that brought him to power four years ago and that Biden will need time to reverse, if he can. Meanwhile, this scenario persists to such an extent that polls indicate that a majority of the Republican electorate is downplaying the attack by far-right, xenophobic and racist gangs on Capitol Hill on January 6. And they still hold the inconsistent story of a hatched election.

Asset It is both Vox in Spain, like the German AFD or the far right of the League The Italian who, with the troops of Silvio Berlusconi or the neo-fascism of Fratelli d’Italia, is today the most important electoral force in this country, with a guaranteed victory in any electoral scenario.

These economic and social contradictions of the last decades are also part of the context of the renewed independence of Catalonia, which has returned to the front page, without ever having left it completely, due to Sunday’s election. In this election, socialism won, but power through parliamentary alliances will be retained by the secessionists.

The desire for Catalan independence goes back a hundred years and has for greatest emergence the Civil War of 1714 which canceled the cultural and national rights of this people. But the point in recent history is another. It refers to the extent to which this epic has been exploited by sectors that for many of them have never had any connection with this past or cared little for these claims.

The so-called eurosur debacle from Portugal to Greece from 2009 fermented a wave of drowning indignation that shifted the costs of the previous year’s global crisis to the social group. Jobs have been lost, the discipline of paying down debt has been broken, many ended up losing their homes, people committed suicide in Rome, Barcelona or Madrid and some countries went bankrupt, as was evident in the case of Greece. Spain was also in a swamp whose magnitude explained the emergence of new political forces that smoothed the bipartisanship that had reigned there since about the end of the Franco regime.

The Catalan scene

In this scenario, at the start of the last decade, the Catalan right-wing executive, pressed by the same debacle across the country, demanded that the newly arrived conservative national government of Mariano Rajoy agree to grant autonomy. your own collection agency and manage your taxes. The proposal was made in Madrid by then-Catalan President Artur Mas, a leader from the political fraternity of conservative and also corrupt nationalist Jordi Pujol, the same nursery from which controversial former regional president Carles emerged. Puigdemont, curiously justified as a pair by the ineffable Latin American progress.

The idea involved changing in their favor the co-participation of a region at the time with the highest GDP in the country. Rajoy categorically rejected the request. He wasn’t going to give up an inch of his collecting power in the midst of this disaster. The reaction of the Catalan executive was to withdraw the independence flags from the coffers to justify, in the conflict with the central government, the adjustments which brought down the population.

The Puigdemont government, which succeeded Mas, was one of those who took advantage of this alibi and it was clear that they were supporting the offensive of the banks to seize their homes from people who, due to the crisis , could not afford their loans and that either even in the street, they escaped these debts. Not by chance, the Diada, the national holiday of September 11 which recalls the fall of Barcelona in this war of 1714, became a massive political event in 2012, precisely the year in which Mas attempted his failed fiscal pact with Madrid and joined this huge protest to advance the elections and renew the mandate.

Spain emerged from the deep well of the crisis under Rajoy’s administration at the cost of an internal transformation that it demolished large swathes of the welfare state and basic social balances. A fact of the way things were done is revealed by statistics from the time of the OECD, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. He maintains that Spain was the third of its members with the highest range of temporary work, 26.1%, followed by Poland and Colombia. A study by Unicef ​​also recalled at that time that the peninsula occupied the same third place in child poverty within the European community, followed only by Romania and Greece.

In these figures is the reason for the political demolition of the PP, the atomization of political parties and the emergence of expressions that sought to channel social rejection, as before Podemos and now the Vox party. By the way, obeying the old rule that necessity is heretical, the PSOE of President Pedro Sánchez and Podemos de Pablo Iglesias have incurred a significant debt with this ultra formation, the other lines that have crossed. Last January, the government managed to avoid an abyss like the one that led to the dissolution of the executive of Giuseppe Conte in Italy with the life jacket that gave him this training.

This was the law to channel the virtually unreimbursed financial aid that the European Union has provided for the countries most affected by the pandemic, the same resources whose administrative control caused the Italian collapse. In the Spanish case, 140 billion euros on which there is still no total clarity on how they will be distributed.

The law had already been approved, but it was not ratified by Parliament, but it also did not garner enough support as the Catalans of the center-left independence party Esquerra Republicana (ERC) changed their vote and abandoned the ruling coalition. This turning point had Sunday’s election in view. The ERC did not want to give up the votes, sticking to the government it blamed for the imprisonment of its leaders. The ultra-right-wingers of Vox, Spain’s third political force, covered the space left by the Catalans and saved the Sánchez and Iglesias coalition and, above all, the destination to define resources.
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