From Berlin to Valencia, passing through Ripoll

Germany will have as chancellor Friedrich Merz, a politician with a marked aversion to everything public, to feminism and to the rights of minorities, and who has promised to restrict borders "from the first day" of his mandate. He is a multimillionaire, a braggart and a long-winded man, in line with other leaders of the global right, but always within the limits imposed by the Hegelian tradition of German liberalism and nationalism. Merz represents the CDU that is furthest from Merkel (her policy of welcoming more than a million refugees ten years ago is a milestone and a legacy that many still do not know how to deal with, neither on the right nor on the left), and also the one that has the least problems in understanding the neo-Nazis of Alternative for Germany.

Merz and the CDU/CSU, however, will be doing their best to form a government with the depleted Social Democrats of the SPD, re-enacting a less than proud version of the Grand Coalition. In other words, they will practice the policy of the cordon sanitaire, which, as long as no one comes up with anything better, remains an effective way of preventing far-right and illiberal parties from accessing government institutions. It is true that traditional social democracy and liberalism bear a large part of the responsibility for the rise of racist, populist and nationalist proposals, for not having been able to respond to the issues that polarize societies, starting with immigration. But it is equally true that, once this rise occurs, isolating far-right parties is a much better (more effective) measure than opening up to governing with them. And it is also the right-wing parties that have the most urgent, and certainly the most important, part of the cordon sanitaire: to be the first to refuse to identify the extreme right as valid interlocutors in democracy, no matter how many electoral boundaries they can create.

Not doing so has consequences like those we see in the Valencian Community, where a PP and Vox government, after the shameful management of the DANA, distributes the reconstruction contracts among its supporters while, on the other hand, it carries out yet another offensive against the Catalan language (or Valencian seeks nothing more than to turn Valencian into a residual language in the Valencian Community). Or as in the Balearic Islands, where the educational community has managed to ward off linguistic segregation in primary schools, but measures such as dental examinations for immigrants are being implemented. Where we have a president of the Parliament who is a fanatic who tears down photos of the victims of Francoism (for which he will have to answer to justice for a hate crime). The reflection also applies to Catalan politics, where Junts is making a mess of itself by preparing to "talk" with the Catalan Alliance, with the fallacious argument that, in a democracy, one speaks to everyone. No: in a democracy, those who want to end democracy are identified and isolated.