With my head in Spain: I loosen up so I don't have to choose
Defining oneself in terms that deviate from what is systemic and structural always implies fighting against the elements and, even, against oneself. We may say that we are not racist, but social racism is so inoculated within each of us that we must militate obstinately to escape it. We may say that we are feminists and more or less the same will happen to us. We will know, if we are self-critical and conscious, that every day we may maintain sexist attitudes, which we will have to try to correct while seeking demanding coherence. Just as it will not be easy for us to define ourselves as anti-capitalists while we go on accumulating monetary assets and real estate as a result of our work effort.
Also, those of us who want a free country and seek a self-centered life far from the Spanish metropolis must fight against the system and against ourselves so as not to fall into the bars of the symbolic universe of those who have colonized us for, at the very least, three centuries.
The prestidigitator Sánchez has taken advantage of the Maricarmen earthquake to ride the wave of the housing tsunami and invent an implausible lifeboat in the face of a shipwreck that seems (or seemed) inevitable.
The polls make it clear that the two majority parties (the PSOE and the PP) will lose votes on 29-N. Vox will rise, surely more moderately than the surveys say. But where is the catch? To the left of the PSOE there is a storm of diluvian dimensions, a political DANA very typical of the habitual Cainism of the true left. There are statistics that show that if Irene Montero were to become friends with Yolanda Díaz and Ada Colau, they could get double the seats they would get now and the sum of everything and everyone could keep Abascal and company away from power.
But let's look at it, 30 seconds ago we were talking about self-centered life and it turns out we have Spain inside our heads. And this paradoxical symbiosis leads us inevitably to talk about the other star of the moment: Gabriel Rufián. The most brilliant parliamentarian of recent years in Madrid has proposed himself as the strange link that could unite two irreconcilable equals like Montero and Díaz, like Podemos and Sumar. As much as Rufián insists on the idea, Esquerra Republicana has never been a party to the left of the PSOE, at least in the opinion of this poor columnist. The postulates of the party of Macià, Companys and Junqueras are more easily identifiable with mainstream social democracy. The particularity that differentiates it, or should differentiate it, from the party of the GAL and the quicklime is precisely the project of national liberation of Catalonia, and when it says Catalonia, the one who writes to you today thinks of the whole of it.
It seems clear that the Congress of Deputies has intoxicated Rufián with Spain, and the referential framework of this representative of ours in the metropolis is already that of the metropolis and not that of the territory that configures the Catalan nation. However, whether due to the effect of a dog beaten by the truncheons of the first of October 2017, whether due to the application of Article 155, or due to the subsequent repression that still lasts today, the great sovereignist parties have acquired roles that until now were not their own. Junts per Catalunya has become a party of undisguised right-wing, with speeches that border on, or cross, xenophobia and with shameful votes like those that vetoed Sánchez's Maricarmen decrees in Madrid. Esquerra, on the other hand, seems to end up turning its neck to be part of the Spanish political circus. A bit like what is also happening in Mallorca, where the agreement of MÉS with Sumar and Esquerra Unida has already been closed to run in the Spanish elections in November. To top it off, in the Senate, they will go with the PSOE, in a strategy that aims, they say, to make the votes yield a little more.
The days are left behind when the sovereignist parties thought in territorial and national terms and did not get fed up with Spanish reasons, unless it was to go there, all alone and determined, to demand more national justice and more social justice.
Only two parties in the Principality have spoken clearly in this regard. Sílvia Orriols' Aliança Catalana, despite knowing that it could obtain optimal results, has already announced that it will not run. Some may believe that their stance is loyal and honorable. Others might perhaps read into it the idea that the mayor of Ripoll and her henchmen do not want to divide the far-right vote and prefer to leave the way clear for Vox. The other party that does not want to run in the Spanish elections is the CUP. The cupaires have been to Madrid once, and it is unknown if they have decided not to go this time because the chances of obtaining representation are light-years away from any possibility.
What do we do, then, as self-centered little people who believe in social justice? Do we ignore the Spanish elections and contribute to the arrival of the most decrepit far-right in Europe to the metropolitan government? Can you imagine the one with the caliph's beard as vice president? Or do we accept our resignation as a people and vote for the lesser evil diluted within the always false “plurinational” amalgam of the Spain that plays the good cop?
In good Majorcan we say “I'm opting out to avoid choosing”.
