Catalan chainsaws

In a short time, the rise of the extreme right in Catalonia has gone from being a catastrophic fantasy to being reflected in a 24% voting intention in a survey in The VanguardIt's curious, because in this regard, too, Catalan politics had been grafted onto Spanish politics: Spain was the country where analysts long claimed that the far right curiously didn't exist. "After forty years of Franco's dictatorship, Spain was vaccinated," some asserted, without a trace of irony. In reality, it was already visible to anyone who cared to see that a substantial part of the Spanish far right lived entrenched within the Popular Party (another part was outside, this is true) until it broke away by creating its own parties: Ciudadanos, first, and then Vox. This doesn't mean that far-right sectors don't continue to exist within the PP, which, in fact, are the ones that set the agenda and discourse of the always-bewildered Feijóo and his leadership.

In Catalonia, there was no far-right either, according to some, mainly due to its status as a persecuted and battered country. "On top of that, now they're also calling us far-right," has been and continues to be a cry that appeals to the most victim-oriented pro-independence movement. According to these voices, speaking of the far-right in Catalonia was a dark tactic of the Spanish left. The botched Spanish left exists, but that doesn't mean the pro-independence far-right also exists, and here we have it, experiencing days of great hope. It feeds primarily on the Junts electorate, as Vox does on the PP's votes. There is also a far-right vote (a much smaller percentage, but it exists) that comes from the center-left or even the anti-capitalist left. Vox can scratch votes from the PSOE and also from Podemos; the Catalan Alliance can take votes from ERC and also from Podemos or the CUP. Anything is possible. But, in any case, the main source of fuel for the European far right clearly comes from the traditional right and center-right spaces. That is why in European countries with a stronger democratic tradition, these parties (Rénaissance in France, CDU in Germany, the Tories English) practice the policy of the cordon sanitaire against the respective extreme right.

Warning about the rise of the far right in Catalonia is not, or should not be, another way of pointing fingers. Rather, the first step is to understand a problem, which is to accept its existence. The far right is rising in Catalonia, and in the Catalan Countries, for the same reasons as everywhere else: large influxes of immigration with the subsequent demographic changes (and, therefore, problems of coexistence, racism, xenophobia, supremacism) and the weakening of the welfare state, of the middle classes, and of the middle classes with respect to labor rights in particular and civil rights in general. The fact that the extremists proclaim their patriotism at every point is also usually a fairly unequivocal way of identifying them.