With each passing day it becomes more evident that Junts has begun a process of reincarnation. The immortal convergent soul attempts to transmigrate into a new being, without completely abandoning the body of the “nasciturus” independence movement that presented itself as transversally progressive if not anti-system.
It is a highly complex operation fraught with contradictions, because building the future by returning to the past and ignoring the present is only possible in the melancholic dreams of the nostalgic, which abound so much lately.
Catalan and Spanish society is not that of the 80s of the last century. The social bases of Convergencia, the mesocracy of the petite bourgeoisie, without disappearing, have given prominence to a new mesocracy that lives under the protective halo of the public sector.
The political scenario is nothing like that in which the nationalist majority in Catalonia, which called itself the Catalan minority in Madrid, conditioned the governability of Spain with its votes, negotiating and agreeing with the parties on a quasi-perfect two-party system.
Although there are traces of those old political forms, the situation is far from being a repetition of those times. For decades, Pujolism negotiated with the different Spanish governments to achieve the transfer of powers that were then exercised from the powerful Pujolist galaxy.
The objective was to expand self-government, while feeding the nationalist discourse on which to lay the foundations of ideological hegemony in Catalan society.
In exchange, CIU was committed to the governability of Spain, agreeing with the PSOE and from 1996 with the PP. At times, parliamentary stability was exchanged on both sides of the Ebro, although it was sacrificing the PSC when necessary or aborting the attempts of sectors of the Catalan PP to build a non-nationalist conservative right.
Now the scenario is very different. Junts is outside the governance of all Catalan institutions. Their interest in increasing the ceiling of self-government is much less. In reality, that is not their objective, it is just their alibi, because any progress in the negotiations with the Spanish government will be capitalized on by others in Catalonia.
For Junts, the demands for more self-government have become mere stagings whose main objective is to guarantee their political survival in a context of electoral weakness.
It is no longer about advancing independence – 2017 is far away – or even expanding self-government. Now the aims of Junts and all its movements are to reinforce its profile in a global context of clear rightward movement, while at the same time conditioning Spanish politics.
That Junts has placed the “full” transfer of immigration powers as a priority does not respond to the desire to expand self-government. Its intention is different, to relocate itself to the political space that conservative forces in Europe and the world occupy today. At the same time, it tries to protect itself on that side from the advances of the Catalan Alliance, with which it shares and disputes a part of its electoral bases.
Junts has gone, in a short space of time, from wanting to build its own state for Catalonia unilaterally to becoming involved in the orientation of the policies of the Spanish state. His position against taxes on energy companies is about that.
In reality, it is about returning, without much notice, to the role played at the time by the Democratic Union of Duran i Lleida and Sánchez Llibre, the true creator of the lobbying strategy in Congress that continues to be exercised today through of the Catalan employers’ association Promotion of National Work.
What Junts is trying to do is more difficult than squaring the circle, it is trying to discover dry water. Going in such a short space of time from unilateral independence – which they boasted about until recently in their sleepless struggle with ERC – to wanting to be a protagonist in Spanish politics is a juggling act that is difficult even for Puigdemont, the king of fiction and cunning. .
But the difficulty is not only his, but it radiates to all his interlocutors, for whom it is no longer enough to offer counterparts with which to fill “peix el cove”, among other things because the Catalan government’s basket is already in other hands, which are not those of Junts.
The last negotiation in which it was possible to exchange tangible things was that of the amnesty law, which almost everyone in the world of politics considers amortized. Now Junts is pursuing a more intangible objective, to be recognized for its political weight and its ability to destabilize the Spanish legislature. That is what the demand that Pedro Sánchez submit to a vote of confidence is about. His interlocutors are running out of gestures, and the few who still have them seem to want to temporarily limit them.
In the coming weeks we will experience even more vaudevillian situations. Junts can block the budgets, even make legislative activity difficult, but it cannot, not yet, execute its threat to overthrow the coalition government, no matter how much Feijoó tempts it and begs it.
I wrote “not yet”. We would do well to take nothing for granted. In recent months, we have seen many things, until recently unthinkable in the European Union. And anyway, Catalonia is not as different from Spain and Europe as the independence leaders claim. Likewise, Junts ends up achieving their dream of transmigrating and reincarnating into one of their souls.
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