Sánchez also depends on the radical right: Junts

Like so many political phenomena of the last decade (Brexit, Podemos), the process was an empty signifier. To a word, independence, each one gave the meaning they wanted. For CUP voters, independence meant the possibility of making a revolution. For ERC, it opened the door to increasing the power of rural areas with little de-Catalan at the expense of the province of Barcelona, which is increasingly Spanish. For the old Convergència i Unió, independent Catalonia would be at the service of local business elites, as in a kind of Mediterranean Singapore.

It was about ideological reveries. But the trick worked and the procés got the support of half the Catalan population. And he achieved an additional feat: the vast majority of Spaniards, including almost the entire left, opposed self-determination, but a good part of the Spanish left decided to treat the independence parties, for political purposes, as if they were left-wing..

Last year, the CUP had twice as many voters in rich neighborhoods (32%) than in poor ones (14%).. ERC has never been a workerist or Marxist party, but petty-bourgeois and Catholic-inspired. But, with certain semantic efforts, they could be located on the left. However, considering the offspring of Convergència i Unió as a left-wing ally has much merit. CiU was very right-wing. Its main heir, Junts, has gone further: to a large extent, it is a radical right-wing party, in line with almost all other European nationalisms. The PSOE has a legitimate right to seek your support for the investiture. But we must remember that this is its nature.

Together and the radical right

Normally, this argument is dismissed because Junts is not intransigent on moral issues such as homosexuality or abortion. But neither is the formation of Le Pen in France, nor are many of the Scandinavian authoritarian right-wing parties. Otherwise, their features are common. After the repeated refusal of the European institutions to support the independence process, in what is now Junts, eurosceptic impulses emerged. In 2017, Puigdemont called the EU a “club of decadent and obsolescent countries” and called for a referendum for Catalans to decide if they wanted to belong to it.. These impulses have increased after the setbacks of the European Parliament and the General Court of the EU against Puigdemont: he has called the EU “the Europe of the past” and has said that he had been “disappointed”. In Brussels, Junts is an ally of the NVA, the right-wing Flemish nationalist party, which has significant radical elements.. But Puigdemont has also allowed himself to be loved by the Vlaams Belang, which is openly on the extreme right and has supported the Catalan independence movement and the immunity of the former president.. There is more and more conclusive evidence that, informally, the Generalitat presided over by Junts had contacts with representatives of the State of Russia to prepare for eventual independence.

But the link between Junts and the European radical right is also evident in other aspects.. To begin with, its most charismatic leaders, Puigdemont and Laura Borràs, have, like almost all of these movements, a volatile, messianic and authoritarian character, and enormous contempt for democratic procedures.. The irregular approval of the disconnection laws prior to the referendum of October 2017 made explicit the vision of Junts, shared by all the European radical right-wing, that what they consider to be non-national minorities (in this case, the Spanish) does not enjoy the same political rights as the national majority (in this case, the pro-independence Catalans). And the same thing is frequently reiterated in the vision that Junts and his reference intellectuals convey about Spanish-speaking Catalans, particularly those of the lower class: they use an apparently inclusive rhetoric, but that conveys to whoever wants to hear it that their idea of Catalans leaves out Half of the population.

An even more radical split

In this sense, it is eloquent that there is already an even more explicit radical right split within the independence movement: Aliança Catalana. It is about a new party whose leader, Sílvia Orriols, after a few years dedicated to the militancy of the process, has achieved the mayoralty of Ripoll, and who transmits even more explicitly than Junts the ideological coordinates of conservative nativism. Not only with measures against Muslim immigrants, the first point of his ideological program, but also against non-independence Catalans. “For her,” the journalist Joan Burdeus wrote last week in a brilliant report in the Catalan-language booklet of the newspaper El País, “Catalan is not someone who lives and works in Catalonia, but rather someone who assumes that Catalonia is a nation with a single language, that it has been occupied for 300 years and that it is necessary to fight to free it”.

The inspiration for the rest of his show, says Burdeus, is also “pure Bannon.”. According to his account, for his financier and adviser, Jordi Aragonès (cousin of the president of the Generalitat), “the right-wings that are growing are those that have adopted a mixture of industrial protectionism, identity nationalism and a radical discourse against immigration, all in the name of to protect the normal people at home”. The financiers of this process? “Entrepreneurs and ex-politicians from the orbit of Convergence and Union”, says Burdeus. Junts has not gone to these extremes because it is a party too rooted in the traditional establishment and fond of respectable political terms.. But that will surely be the direction that at least one faction of the right-wing independence movement in Catalonia will adopt..

A part of the Spanish left believes that the independence movement is from the left because it opposes the political and business elites of Madrid; Proof of this is that PSOE and Sumar have chosen Jaume Asens, a man from Podemos, as negotiator with Junts for the investiture. Another part, very large in the PSOE, is not fooled: it wants to agree with Junts only because there is no other choice but to do so to come to power. Which is legit. But it should be clear with this that Pedro Sánchez is also going to depend on the radical and eurosceptic right.