It is not Marx's beard, it is Google Maps

We have general elections again, and to no one's surprise, we are once again facing the “most important elections in recent years,” or at least that is what they want us to believe. We already know the script: the fascists are coming, democracy is in danger, and it is time to mobilize to avoid disaster. I will not deny that it is an effective argument, but by dint of repeating it, it has ended up becoming just another tradition of progressive customs, almost as deep-rooted as the Christmas lottery advertisement or the summer song on TV3. Remember that “If you don't go, they come back” with which the PSOE encouraged us to go vote in 2008? Well, that. Years have passed, some faces have changed, and the slogans have been modernized, but the little tune is the same.

Amid this climate of permanent emergency, it comes to my mind—as I am a bit of a geek—that very provocative slogan with which the Abertzale left presented itself in the 1987 European elections, now almost 40 years ago: ‘Vote where it hurts them most’. Those were the years of lead in the Basque Country, marked by ETA's violence, which that same year perpetrated such terrible attacks as those at Hipercor in Barcelona and the Zaragoza barracks. In that context, the candidacy led by the lawyer Txema Montero achieved, against all odds, more than 360,000 votes and a seat in the European Parliament. And I say against all odds because a good part of the success came from outside Euskal Herria: nearly 100,000 votes—more than 53,000 of which were from the Catalan Countries! Without these supporters, the numbers would hardly have added up.

But where did these votes come from? A good part came from revolutionary Marxist organizations such as the Communist Movement and the Revolutionary Communist League, as well as from sectors of the radical left and the anti-NATO movement, which had decided to support Herri Batasuna. And what was part of the Spanish left doing voting for a Basque nationalist candidacy? The answer has a lot to do with a word that today seems almost out of fashion: ‘rupture’. While a good part of the anti-Franco left had ended up accepting the rules of the game that emerged from the Transition, HB continued to defend a project that linked national liberation with transformation. Naturally, this does not erase the deep contradictions of that experience, especially its relationship with violence. But it helps to understand why a part of society saw in them what it found less and less in other organizations: a mass movement that still aspired to change the rules of the game.

This relationship between nationalism and rupture is not an exception, nor is it a particularity of the Basque Country. Historians have noted that from the 1960s onwards, various nationalist movements in Western Europe, such as those in Corsica, Brittany, Galicia, and the Catalan Countries, began to link the struggle for national liberation with popular demands. It was no longer just about defending a language, a culture, or an identity, but about questioning the power of states and, above all, imagining a different society.

And here we find one of the great paradoxes of the current left: while Sumar, IU, and Podemos seem to have stopped dreaming of changing the world to settle for obtaining a ministry or a labor reform—very legitimate objectives, but which will hardly shake capitalism—, some national liberation movements—even right-wing ones!—still keep alive the idea of building a new society. In Europe, like it or not, it is no longer Marx's beard that makes us dream of a better world, but the hope of taking that small piece of the world that appears on Google Maps, drawing a border on it, and thinking that, within those four lines, we can do things differently. Is it a utopia? Surely. But utopias have this small inconvenience for those who govern: sometimes they are capable of transforming the world.

But why am I telling you all this? Because, as I said at the beginning, we are called to the polls again and, once more, fear marks the campaign, while our demands, both of class and of country, remain in the background. Given this panorama, I believe that Ara Més-Front Ampli, with Carme Gomila at the helm, can represent a discordant voice. A candidacy that brings together independentists, sovereignists, and sectors of the transformative left and that, despite the contradictions and limitations—of which there are many!—opens the possibility of bringing a voice of our own from Mallorca to Congress. Because voting for the PSOE is continuing within the same old script: Sánchez against the right, the right against Sánchez, and us playing the part of spectators. The question is whether we want to continue trapped in this dispute or bet on a policy of our own, rooted in the country, committed to the working classes, and capable of questioning the rules of the game.

To finish, I ask you a question: what would be more annoying to a PP and Vox government? A strengthened PSOE or thirty or forty left-wing deputies, among whom a voice of our own for Majorcanism in Congress? Remember that old slogan: ‘Vote where it hurts them most’.