1.- To deserve.-- "Catalonia doesn’t deserve this", said Marta Ferrusola, wife of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol, in response to questions from congressional members. One or the other: it’s either an exercise in extraordinary cynicism or the expression of a complete loss of a sense of reality, of alienation in a world that exists only inside her head. What Catalonia doesn’t deserve is what the Pujol family has done with her and in her name. The fuss from Mrs. Ferrusola or the strutting exhibitionism of her son Jordi, an upstart who thinks that success is measured by the Ferraris that he has in his garage, don’t have any more meaning than what we want to give them in the unending inventory of human misery. The problem is that in the middle of all this is President Pujol, who ruled Catalonia for twenty-three years; and every time he enters the scene, he gets a little smaller. In fact, President Pujol is already invisible. That leader who appealed to the patriotism and greatness of a nation, and who scolded those who were not able to sacrifice themselves for her, today is just one more citizen in trouble, who is behaving like any defendant would, willing to squander his prestige in order to save himself and his family from legal urgency. If President Pujol had truly wanted to live up to the responsibilities that he once had, there was only one option: to tell it all, whatever the cost. But fear has prevailed. The president no longer exists-- what is left is just Mr. Pujol, passing like a sleep-walker from interrogation to interrogation, refusing to accept reality, every time with a smaller voice. Certainly Catalonia doesn’t deserve this.
2.- Contradictions.- In Spain this election year has announced itself as the end of bipartisanship. Democracy, founded on the principle that whoever achieves a majority governs, favors a certain dynamic of bipartisan concentration, which in Congress is seen as the government and the opposition, right and left. Bipartisanship has been a system for control and framing of the population, a system that has lost efficiency because its main protagonists have ended up resembling each other too much. To the extent that a vast majority of citizens view themselves with middle class values, the battle between the principal parties is focused on an appeal to a very similar model of voters, and as such, it is difficult to identify differences between what they offer. Bipartisanship shattered when the crisis hit the middle classes; they fractured, and the interplay of interests became more complicated. And they have become aware of the impotence of governments that have been dependent on Brussels and the diktat of the markets that finance them.
In Catalonia, the two-party system (CiU-PSC) died with Pujol-ism. And we have moved on from the traditional right/left division with the three-party party coalition government to the right to self-determination and independence as the new dividing lines. The newest political parties on the scene (Ciutadans and Podemos) are trying to break barriers with an argument that until now was the property of conservatives: overcoming the distinction between right and left. Curiously, while the electoral options have multiplied, more and more people are telling me that it is more difficult than ever to decide. When the game was between two and little more, there was always the possibility of voting not so much in favor as against, so that the other wouldn’t win. Now it is not so easy. There is certainly the option of voting against the existing system, which in Catalonia can be accomplished in two ways, which sometimes intersect: an institutional break (with Spain), and social break. But people are growing demanding and they want to see to what point the new options offer truly different choices.
At the same time, the simplistic logic of democracy may very well lead to elections in which the vote is in favor of or against the status quo. In Spain, to the extent that the traditional parties become entrenched in the defense of bipartisanship, this appears to be a dynamic that is gaining power. The popular success of Ciutadans in Madrid is due to the fact that "the establishment" sees in it a novelty that makes them believe that there can be relief without leaving the official schema. In Catalonia it is different. The vote in favor of breaking with the state is competing with the vote in favor of a different kind of break, the social kind. Everything will depend on what takes precedence as the principal contradiction: social causes or a sense of identity. In this sense the September elections will indeed be a plebiscite.
