Josep Borrell
The right and the pro-independence parties end up being allies in the same
strategy, some for tacticism and others for disloyalty, but none with a sense
of state and general interest
Thursday, 02/21/2019 | Updated at 16:30 CET
The politics has experienced
intense days: the confusion of a falsified story about the negotiation between
parties on the Catalan problem, the disproportionate and not so much seconded call to demostrate to defend Spain’s unity, more falsehoods about the alleged acceptance of the famous "21 points of Torra", the most social budget of the last decade thrown
into the trash bin by partisan interests; and as a consequence a call for elections.
The 'fake news' machine and the insults of heavy
caliber have worked to the top. It could have been discussed reasonably on the
usefulness, convenience or functions of the "rapporteur /
coordinator" of the meetings of the political groups, but nothing
justifies that this is the "most serious thing that has happened in Spain
since the 1981 coup d'état". Suddenly, they forget the decades of struggle
against terrorism, or the attacks of 11-M, the most serious ones occurred in
European territory, to accuse of nothing less than “high treason” the
Prime Minister of Spain. Very serious accusation, typified in the Penal Code, which must be
supported by legal instruments, such as Article 102 of the Constitution, which
allows Mr. Casado to act with the members of Parliament the PP party seats in
Congress.
The intolerance against the one who does not think the same
Faraday, the Briton who studied electromagnetism
said: "An orator detracts a lot of dignity from his character when he
skews the information so that he can be presented with applause and
flattery".
As in Physics, in this hour of politics the polar
opposites attract each other. What underlies the bottom of the proposals of the
right, which fill with screaming the seats of Las Cortes, is the intolerance
with those who do not think the same. It seems that the problem is not how the
socialists rule, but that the socialists govern. Machado's poem, ‘Campos de
Castilla’, comes too often to my mind, where he said that in Spain, "out
of ten heads, nine ram and one thinks", and sometimes with difficulties in
identifying the one which thinks.
In the other pole the pathetic invocations of the
pro-independence supporters to the government to “be brave", "not to fear
the right" and "to dare" to recognize the "right to
self-determination", while demanding to disregard the Constitution to
approve the Budgets, are already so tiresome. They cannot speak on behalf of
the Catalan people, excluding more than half of the citizens of Catalonia who
did not vote for them. Identity-based nationalisms appeal to the sacred unity
of the "people", but often end up in division and social
confrontation.
There is a language of two reactive nationalisms, the ‘we’ and the ‘they’,
the Catalans and the Spaniards, the patriots and the traitors, who seek to
separate us. In fact there is not so much distance between those who believe
that the worse, the better.
The pro-secession parties try to get an
international mediation that facilitates a negotiation on an equal footing
between the Government of Spain and the Government of the Generalitat. For this
they denigrate the quality of our democracy and our legal system and present
Spain as a repressive state that systematically violates human rights. But,
certainly, Spain is not South Yemen, nor Bosnia, nor Kosovo, nor Slovenia at
its worst moments, and neither the European Union nor any government in the
world accepts that false story.
The two antagonistic poles end up being allies in
the same strategy, some for tacticism and the others for disloyalty. None with
a sense of state and general interest. In this equation the variable "real
needs of the people" do not exist. Budgets represented the largest growth
in public spending since 2010, trying to reverse the social cuts caused by the
crisis, with the highest spending for pensions, dependency, scholarships or
fight against gender violence and child poverty. They also incorporated
measures to encourage growth and employment. Policies of vital importance were
reinforced to boost the competitiveness and growth potential of our economy,
such as investment in Research, Development and Innovation, infrastructure or
human capital.
For Catalonia they represented an investment of
2,251 million euros, 16.8% of the total of the autonomous communities, a figure
that does not reach its share in the GDP, but that represented an increase of
18.5%. It is pertinent to remember here that the last budgets that Catalonia
had were those of 2016, approved precisely with the support of the CUP. Since
then, in Catalonia there have been neither budgets nor, therefore, government
action.
These accusations of the two poles are the language
of two reactive nationalisms, the ‘we’ and the ‘they’, the Catalans and the
Spaniards, the patriots and the traitors, who seek to separate us. There is not
so much distance between those who believe that the worse, the better.
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