The CEO barometer confirms the shift that has taken place in a significant portion of the Catalan independence movement in relatively few years, which can be summarized as a shift from hope and confidence in a political and civic project to withdrawal, victimhood, and a desire to protect the essence of the threatened homeland. This shift is occurring in the West, as we know, but in Catalonia and the Catalan Countries, the failure of the Process has accelerated it and given it specific characteristics.
The Catalan Alliance is growing like an infection, as was to be expected, because that's how the far right grows in this cycle of retreat. However, some of those who are now exclaiming about the growth of Silvia Orriols and Jordi Aragonès's party were up in arms not even two days ago every time someone denounced the existence of a Catalan far right and a pro-independence movement, and they attributed it to defamation by the self-conscious and woke. Now they face a party with two members in Parliament and the prospect of multiplying this representation by five, which proposes mass deportations (with immigrants in handcuffs, naturally, in the style of the admired sheriff and Uncle Trump) and which, if it ever obtains representation in the European Parliament, will do so in the Patriotes por Europa group, with whom it shares complete ideological ties. Of course, the same clairvoyants who inflamedly denied the existence of an independence-seeking far-right have largely contributed to its rise. And they will continue to contribute if they persist in the habit they have acquired of identifying everywhere as traitors, cowards, naive, sellouts, indecent, capitulators, weaklings, degenerates, and lily-bearers.
The preachers of retreat and catastrophism, often self-proclaimed intellectuals, perceive themselves as the only ones capable of seeing what the country needs (they often construct sentences that contain precisely this phrase: "the country") and need to attack and belittle everything and everyone who doesn't fit their thesis. They are not strictly the far right, but they are boiling the pot of poisoned broth in which the far right is brewing.
The independence movement that led to the October 1st referendum was a popular, progressive, and unequivocally democratic movement. For this reason, the closer the divide between sectors of the independence movement and the far right, the better for the far right and the worse for the independence movement: in parallel with the rise of the Catalan Alliance, the CEO notes the decline in supporters of independence, down to 38%. As is the case in Spanish politics, there are interconnections between the traditional democratic right and the far right: everything the Catalan Alliance gains, Junts loses, just as everything Vox gains, the PP loses. It is time for Junts to decide whether to break with this dynamic and unambiguously distance itself from xenophobic and illiberal rhetoric, or to prepare to embrace it and, when the time comes, reach agreements.
