Alligators and lizards

"Some sell out the nation for positions and small change, while others give it away to those who arrive, towed by traffickers and mafias. And meanwhile, we Catalans are getting up at five in the morning to pay for the party." These are the lines from a speech by the leader of the Catalan Alliance, Sílvia Orriols, in the Parliament. Those, according to her, who sell out the nation for small change are the ERC (Republican Revolutionary Party); those who give it away are the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party); those who arrive, towed by traffickers and mafias, are the immigrants who manage to survive the journeys aboard the small boats. With an intonation that seems straight out of a TV3 recording from the 1980s, the Orriolsian rhetoric (a reduction of the ideological outpourings of the party's founder, Jordi Aragonès, a close friend of President Pere Aragonès) spits resentment at all the groups in the chamber, especially theirs in Catalonia, and blames them on the left. Or they can't live in peace, or with reasonable prospects, condemned to getting up at five in the morning to pay for the privileges of immigrants towed by mafias. Right-wing groups, especially Junts, are treated like brothers sold out by the system, but brothers nonetheless, condemned to come to an understanding one day or another.

Victimhood, demagoguery, identification of enemies, finger-pointing at those responsible for a supposed national collapse that finds its maximum expression in the fact that North Africans are found in the streets. Racism sprinkled with lies ("we would like the children of Catalans to be treated as well as these guys"), climate change denial ("an excuse to limit freedoms"), natalism (she presents herself in X as "the mother of five Catalans"), suspicion against culture as a kind of buts that woke ("You are used to traveling," he reproached Salvador Isla, in a suspicious tone). Etc.

The Catalan Alliance's contribution to Catalan parliamentarianism, after more than a year in the chamber, is shockingly mediocre, comparable only to that left by Ciutadans during its disgraced existence. AC is not just a populism born from the disenchantment of a segment of the independent movement, spread by Arrimadas, Carrizosa, and company. This very thing predicts (and even seems to assure) strong electoral growth in an election that Isla would rather not hold without completing the full term, that is, in 2028.

Those who applaud or smile at Donald Trump's prisons surrounded by alligators and crocodiles feel satisfaction in contemplating the lizard-like Trumpism of Mr. Esteve, who represents AC within Catalan politics. A synthesis, surely not as implausible as it may seem, between the ultra-Spanishness of Vox and Ciutadans and the supremacism of a certain independence movement that now feels humiliated. Surrounding him, and some other currently extra-parliamentary proposal, a swarm of resentful and opportunistic people swarms.