At the end of the getaway

Now, the Catalan national right is turning the page. It seems that the hangover from the Procés is considered over. If President Illa captured the need for detente that existed in Catalan society when independence movement hit its limits, it now seems that conservative Catalanism sees that the time has come to reconfigure the traditional dialectic between right and left (with the national question in the background), before melancholy makes them lose their footing, opening the way for alternatives outside their control.

The Paral·lel 41 Foundation, the initiative led by former minister Victòria Alsina, seems to be heading in this direction, and the reception of its first call, with the parade of a significant number of personalities from a broad spectrum – political, business, cultural, academic, associative, from civil society in general – suggests that it is for real. What does this mean? On one hand, that around conservative Catalan nationalism there is concern about the stagnation in which the convergent space seemed trapped, in the shadow of Puigdemont's blurred image. And that the time has come to accelerate and appear with a new profile and with ambition to gain momentum for the upcoming confrontations.

Conservative nationalism cannot keep muddling through with the air of a hangover. And this means renewal and a new ambition that knows how to connect with the present moment. The inertias of political structures are slow and there are many disparate forces to bring together (and an ossified apparatus in Junts that will not easily recognize that its time for retirement has come). And, obviously, building a new leadership is not easy in a space that is currently quite frayed. But it is true that someone has realized that they were running a high risk if they settled for just watching things happen, with the nationalist far-right of Sílvia Orriols on one side, with a PSC settled into a government without stridency (which is at once its risk and its strength) and with an Esquerra Republicana on the lookout for whatever might fall its way. It is necessary to move. It is surely not easy. Party bureaucracies usually carry slowness within them. But it is common sense that the dialectic between the nationalist right and the socialists that has traditionally articulated Catalan politics must be restored, while at the same time other forces need to readapt to a new scenario in which one must move from the inertias of the hangover of the 'Procés' to a stage that demands renewed projects, ambitious complicities, and solidity to face the reactionary wave that comes from Europe and is on its way to taking root in Spain.