The current so-called socialist government of President Salvador Illa has two virtues. I speak of virtue in the etymological sense, of strength, power, not of conformity to any moral law, which would lead us to a different discussion. The first virtue is that it knows how to emphasize the work of government on management, far removed from previous confusing rhetoric, such as that of the "republican government." The second virtue is the determination with which it seeks to denationalize Catalonia—in the strong sense of the word. nation— to Hispanize it, or if you want to put it another way, to try to relocate it comfortably and docilely within the Spanish nation with soft neocolonialism, soft, as the moderns would say.
The results on the first front are still unknown. With this "government for all," will we have punctual trains? Will the airport be expanded? Will there be 50,000 new homes? Will the streets be safer? Will the use of Catalan recover ground? President Isla has two relevant factors in his favor. On the one hand, the clear support of the Spanish government, because they need each other. On the other, the applause of the conservative forces, mainly those in the economic and media circles, and paradoxically, also that of the so-called left-wing organizations and parties.
He also has a couple of factors against him. The first is that Salvador Illa needs Pedro Sánchez to remain in power for a long time in order to obtain some small competitive advantage by putting up minimal resistance from the rest of the autonomous regions. Without the PSOE governing Spain, the entire project of the current Catalan government is going down the drain. The second obstacle is that the State is deeply anti-Catalan and will continue to place every possible obstacle in the way of justice and the prosperity of Catalonia. We won't even mention the judicial system. But now it has been seen again in the level of budgetary investment execution for the first half of 2024, in which we remain at the bottom of all the autonomous regions. An execution—contrary to those who attribute all the ills to the independence process—that was only exceptional in 2017, with 81% of what was planned.
As for the second virtue, the best that can be said is that it doesn't fool anyone, that it is transparent. Hosting an Andalusian olive oil fair in Sabadell, having appointed a government delegate in Northern Catalonia who did not respect his name or Catalan identity and who was not interested in Sant Jordi Day (finally, he resigned), or going to celebrate Sant Jordi in Madrid, meeting with Javier Cercas and praising without reservation a firm supporter, are signs, they are unequivocal gestures of high symbolic value. President Illa wants the Spanishness of Catalans to be normalized as a preliminary step to the umpteenth attempt to get Spain to normalize Catalan identity. Always understood, of course, in the old way of incorporating it into the Spanish nation (allow me the irony) as a regional peculiarity more so at the events organized by the heirs of the Spanish Trade Union Organization and its Choirs and Dances.
This second objective, defended without hesitation and with practically no resistance from the parliamentary left, also has the support of a good part of the powers that be with Spanish interests—economic, cultural, and social—which offer a good strategic alibi. The return of some social headquarters to Catalonia, such as that of the Banc de Sabadell, responds to the same propaganda logic as when they were taken away. Nothing more. The objective of deconflicting Catalonia's relationship with Spain promises the climate of certainty that all power covets, and the government represents it in all kinds of public events: openings of fairs, literary awards nights, institutional receptions, public media programming...
We don't know that President Salvador Illa will get out of it. His success does not depend on him, but on Spain. On the issue of management, it's not easy, particularly given what is so decisive and has been called "fiscal singularity," about which nothing is known. And regarding the underlying objective, for now I'd say it has better prospects for the Spanish-ization of Catalonia than for the Catalan-ization of Spain. And one thing depends on the other.
Now, what above all makes the government of President Salvador Illa's government soft is the lack of a credible alternative political project on either front, both in terms of management and the national project. Neither of the two parties that could challenge him for hegemony manages to inspire confidence in terms of a hypothetical management more effective than his own. And neither is capable of convincingly explaining how they would lead us to independence if they had the opportunity.
