Antoni Bassas' analysis: 'All these people who wouldn't mind living in a dictatorship'

What's happening today? 50 years since Franco died It is news that support for democracy in Catalonia is at its lowest level since 2012.

According to a survey by the Institute of Political and Social Sciences, about 20% of Catalans, Nearly a million people are open to a dictatorshipBad news caused by a combination of several factors:

People are in a bad economic situation. Now, the problem isn't unemployment anymore. There are jobs, but the wages might not lift you out of poverty.

The problem is housing. The price per square meter continues to break recordsRenting, let alone buying, an apartment is incredibly expensive. And this pushes society towards poverty. The initial reaction is: if politics doesn't solve my problems, the system is useless to me.

Another factor: half a century has passed since the dictator died, and many people are unaware of what it truly means to live under a dictatorship in Spain: the banning of political parties and unions, arbitrary arrests, torture, imprisonment, and even the death penalty. Information censorship. Monitored communications. Passport confiscation at will. The prohibition of the Catalan language. The prohibition of registering your name in Catalan at the Civil Registry. A setback in women's rights. If we were living under a dictatorship, we should leave the European Union. Freedom is like so many other good things in life: you don't value them until you lose them. It seems that democracy makes no difference to our lives. Wrong. A grave mistake. Despite the system's limitations, democracy is the only political system that allows us to live with dignity, even if only because you can remove a government. Try removing a dictator. It is up to us to give meaning to this shell we call democracy. It's not democracy that simply exists. It's shared responsibility, every single day.

We must also consider recent changes, such as immigration, which brings with it a high demand for public services and is quickly exploited by the far right as the scapegoat for all our problems. And let's not forget technological change, which means many people, especially young people, are immersed in YouTube or TikTok channels where they are bombarded with lies and hate. This phenomenon is global and affects all democracies, as we are seeing from the United States to France and Italy.

And in the Spanish case, we mustn't forget that the head of state is the heir of the king who installed Franco, and that this king, Juan Carlos, now speaks favorably of the dictator publicly. The king was a driving force for change (within a certain framework), but he exacted his price in the form of commissions—that is, corruption—which silenced many people for a long time, until someone decided that if Juan Carlos continued down this path, he would destroy the whole system, and they forced his abdication.

I haven't forgotten that in a democracy, Catalonia's independence movement has been combatted with state-sponsored dirty tricks, police violence, economic intimidation, and judicial bias. But we're talking about a country unaccustomed to freedom, with a centralist and Castilian foundation, and therefore, by definition, anti-Catalan. And that, in 50 years of democracy, may be lessened or nuanced, but it doesn't disappear.

Good morning.