The conferences organized by the Círculo de Economía have left us with a very disappointing and old-fashioned dialectic between the social convergence and the left-wing tripartite coalition. The parties of the Proceso coalition had opened a huge gap for anyone willing to put the reform of Catalonia's economic model at the center. Salvador Illa has come to power by installing himself in this field to run. But, just as everyone knows that Spain's good macroeconomic figures have no translation into real life and do not come from deep reforms (Miquel Puig has tiredly reminded us in these pages that the Spanish and Catalan economies have not increased productivity for 30 years, that we grow by importing workers) low cost (inflating a bubble that will sooner or later collapse the welfare state), the center-left and center-right proposals for the post-Process period radiate a stratospheric lack of ambition. Since everything the radical center puts on the table sounds like prolonging the agony of an essentially fraudulent model, a new credibility gap opens up, which the new right exploits in a perfectly logical way.
The decline of the political center around the world is the result of the implosion of a neoliberal globalization model that was unsustainable from the start. I've always liked a metaphor from sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who calls it buy time: "Democratic capitalism has postponed its internal crisis since the 1970s by using public debt, monetary policy, and supranational institutions to avoid facing deep structural contradictions." These contradictions are nothing more than the replacement of the productive economy with different forms of rentism. And here, following economist Yanis Varoufakis, it is important to understand that "rent" does not only mean the rent of land and housing: the money that flows from any speculative financial operation, the price increases that allow a monopolistic position, the exploitation of intangible common heritage like the Barcelona brand... all of these are benefits that come from having control over what it actually costs to produce this thing, and not from the creation of products genuinely useful to the people and the nation. The story of recent decades is that of Western elites exporting the productive economy to Asia in order to transform local economies into models based on living off rents, all the while trying to maintain the illusion of well-being with a combination of free money for the banks and austerity for the middle classes, which sooner or later always comes.
Naturally, the only viable response is to reverse course and return to a productive economy, reindustrialize, focus on added value and research, reduce the room for maneuver in sectors like finance, tourism, and real estate, return bargaining power to workers, and all the other things we know by heart. But when we tune into the Círculo de Economía conferences and listen to Catalan business leaders—Salvador Illa, Junts, Esquerra, or Comuns—we are left with a cynical dialectic: on one side, the proponents of socio-convergence who call for deregulation are perceived as responsible for the deindustrialization of the country, which they simply want; on the other, the tripartite government only proposes timid redistributive measures without ever explaining how we will reform the economic model to produce all the wealth that should be distributed.
Instead, throughout the world, the new right is fighting neoliberal globalization with a forcefulness that resonates with people's perceptions of decline and deception. The solutions these parties propose may be misguided, half-baked, cynical, or downright insane. But for the vast majority of voters, the populist international is the only agent that claims to want to change the old model, while the centrists only call for repeating recipes that haven't worked in the past. In four days in power, Donald Trump had frightened pro-globalization institutions and markets more than the entire left has done in forty years.
It goes without saying that Trumpism is a trap. Traditionally, protectionist projects have been accompanied by state control and internal regulation of markets to benefit domestic workers. But the new right-wing parties aim to reduce neoliberalism externally and redouble it internally. Therefore, the power that workers could gain by not having to compete with cheap immigrant labor would be lost with a domestic system based on austerity, privatization, deregulation, and labor flexibility; a pure leap out of the fire and into the fire. Now, even if we can explain and denounce this alternative from the outside, as long as centrists continue to fail to embrace the critique of neoliberal globalization and fail to propose a credible alternative, the right will simply exploit the contradictions, and we will remain trapped in a downward spiral, forced to choose between a bad model and a bad one.
