The generations of French and Germans that created the European Union are the same that tried to annihilate each other in the 1940s. On July 8 1962, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer participated together in a mass for reconciliation, only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. The ceremony led, within a few months, to a Franco-German friendship agreement, which established the foundations for the cooperation that continues today. The location of the meeting was loaded with symbolism for both countries: the German army had partially destroyed the cathedral of Rheims during the First World War, but it was also in this city on May 7 1945 that Germany signed the unconditional surrender that put an end to the Second World War. Helmut Kohl said in 1987, on the 25th anniversary of this agreement, that in Rheims you can feel what is meant by "the breath of history."
There are two expressions that often clash when heard together, but here help to summarize that spirit: historic greatness and pragmatic calculation. I am not referring only to De Gaulle and Adenauer but, in general, to Europeans who lived through the great disaster of World War II, directly or indirectly. I am convinced that from that unprecedented trauma there arose something like a collective instinct that has guided the conduct of the middle class since then. I am referring to diffuse and intuitive behavior, yet at the same time something that is clearly seen in a lot of historical events and, in particular, in most elections held since 1945 throughout Europe. Let us remember some of them.
Nowadays very few know about French comedian Michel Colucci, better known as Coluche (1944-1986). But it turns out that Coluche very nearly became a candidate in the French presidential elections in 1981. His popularity grew with each passing day, thanks to an overwhelming presence in the media. His discourse, witty and well structured, was aimed directly against representative democracy and politicians. He said, for example, that "si voter changeait quelque chose, il y a longtemps que ça serait interdit" ("if voting could change anything, it would have been prohibited long ago"). Coluche, incidentally, was one of the first to sing the political virtues of indignation, long before Stéphane Hessel. The interesting thing about this story is that even in 1981, during the decline of Gaullism in France, the middle class took a step backward in time. Coluche's speech was funny, served to ridicule the old political class and ... that’s it. And it is one thing to protest when holding European elections and choosing Ruiz-Mateos (1) or some hotshot, and quite another to elect a TV personality like Coluche or someone like that to be President of France. There is a collective instinct among the middle class that prevents it. I mean, you can play at experiencing thrills (if always verbal), laughing at risque jokes (on television), and staging showy collective cathartic events (of course, in a mocking sense); but the joke ends there.
I’d like to stress, at the risk of being redundant, that all of what I just said applies to the middle class. I’m not referring to more generic concepts like citizenship, for example. And now comes the prediction, which is risky precisely because I will formulate it without any type of semantic ambiguity: if a party like Podemos is perceived by the Spanish middle class more as a reaction (perhaps fair and reasonable) than as a proposal, they will end up in third place, far behind the PP and PSOE, and will not survive the next electoral cycle. Symmetrically, if the process of national transition that we are experiencing in Catalonia is associated with the likes of Montenegro or Kosovo, and with expressions like "unilateral declaration of independence", or with corny adolescent attitudes, or seems rushed, then the independence movement will revert back into its testimonial state. The variety of voters, their ideological diversity, is enormous. The expectations of the middle class, on the other hand, are much more specific: this is the portion of the population on which the system is based, that which pays more in taxes than it receives in benefits. The game is based only on this difference, and for that reason it is very fragile. In Catalonia, the middle class took a step forward towards sovereignty because of its survival instinct. Now, for the same reason, they might have second thoughts.
_____________
(1) N.T. Ruiz-Mateos was a controversial Spanish businessman who had a short political career in the 1980s as an MEP.
