Thursday, while I was waiting to pay for some new cruets (one of my children had broken the one for oil) in a small shop across from the Mercat de la Llibertat in Gràcia, I struck up a conversation with another customer about what everyone has ended up calling “the process” (an expression that, for its wispiness and Kafka-esque references makes my friend Jordi Graupera desperate --and rightly so). In no time, with almost no preamble, my partner in conversation let loose with the question that I’ve always feared the most: “Will we succeed?” For a half second, the “process” was suspended by an invisible thread, stopped by a force that seemed to surpass him, me, and everyone.
“Will we succeed?”... This was certainly not the first time that I’ve been asked this question. So far, or to be more specific, until Christmas, with a mixture of internal conviction, indignation, and calculation. Conviction because it’s evident that, for all the economic recovery that there might be (and in any case, it will be absolutely tepid), to not leave Spain would be to condemn the country to an inexorable linguistic, cultural, economic and political decline. Indignation in the face of the belligerent treatment, laced with contempt, incomprehension and silence, with which the State has received the Catalan clamor for a referendum. To live in a cage and on top of that to have to hear (from Madrid but also from a few Catalan journalists and academics) that the cage doesn’t exist is an absolutely beastly and indigestible thing. Calculation because our history tells us that the correlation of forces has been normally unfavorable to us, that we have always had to be careful.
This time there was, to the question, a fourth component: a certain discouragement, a certain loneliness. The partisan tensions throughout the fall and into January have done, undoubtedly, much damage. Our politicians, for various reasons (programmatic considerations, political tactics, personal chemistry), have not risen to the challenge. But also because we Catalans have wanted, mistakenly, to idealize “the process”: we wanted the maximum cleanliness of method; we demanded that politicians submit themselves absolutely to the objective of sovereignty; we hoped that everything would resemble the structured order of the Via (Catalan Way) and the Giant V of September 11. The expectations were so high that the brutality of politics has shaken the naive confidence of a section of the citizenry.
Naturally, those who oppose independence in key mass media, supported by the money and connivance of Spain and the perennial elites, have strived to reinforce this discouragement and this loneliness. Their intention is to make us go back to all those years before the local referendums and the demonstration of 2010, when the country seemed to have dissolved into a mass of isolated individuals, without attributes.
I, on the other hand, am moderately optimistic. First, we have an agreement --one that, to be honest, I gave a less than 50 percent chance of happening in July last year. Secondly, the agreement, despite being still incomplete (and with a different calendar than I would have preferred), includes an essential point: a public commitment to elections on 27 September. And, despite the usual rumors and doubts (such is the nature of this country), the commitment will be met. Not to do so would blow apart the parties that had promised it, and their leaders know it. Thirdly, the format for the elections (for now, with separate lists) does not put its plebiscitary character in question: as much as its detractors might deny it, outside Catalonia everyone understands this well.
Of course, there is nothing automatic or mechanical about “the process.” Everything began with the people and it will continue that way. The big national civic associations (Òmnium and the ANC) must ensure that the political commitments are fulfilled. On the one hand, by forcing a pact around a road map (there is one, complete yet flexible enough, drafted by the CATN). On the other hand, by indicating to the people who the parties and coalitions are that belong unambiguously to the “Yes-Yes” camp. All of this must be accompanied by the active leadership of our politicians. The inequality of resources is so great that there is no room for leaders that are neutral arbiters: they must commit to the cause in their discourse, and they must begin to build the foundations of an independent country (with a detailed calendar of actions) before the elections.
Finally, we must recover (if we ever lost it, which I doubt) the hegemony of ideas. In Spain they have invented a new proposal, Podemos, which aims to reconstruct, with respect to Catalonia, the drowsing strategy of the Felipe-era PSOE. Podemos will gobble up half of the PSC, and, allied with the semi-native alternative leftist platforms, will kill ICV (if they haven’t already). But for them to penetrate the pro-Catalan majority, with their mixture of populism, banal anti-capitalism, and jingoism, seems, however difficult. In any case, they must be opposed with all the tools that are available to us. Otherwise, the cage will close once again, and perhaps forever.
