The coming storm

The recent CEO survey can easily lead to two opposing conclusions: The first is the existence of underlying electoral currents that invite the alarmists to imagine a country ideologically shattered and with a large presence of disaffected people or supporters of this tendency of ours (constant but intermittent) to throw everything away.But the same data allow for a second reading. Based on cold arithmetic, while accepting that the country is a hornet's nest, the poll does not allow us to imagine many scenarios beyond a more or less nuanced continuation, that is, a government resulting from the pact between PSC and ERC, with the support of the Comuns or Junts, depending on its outcome. It would not be an overwhelming majority, but it would have the atomization of the opposition in its favor, which will turn out to be an insoluble mixture of ideological enemies.The great destabilizing factor that the CEO reveals is the consolidated existence of a dual far-right vote – Catalan and Spanish – around 25% of the votes (more than 30%, if we add the PP). The dazzling irruption of Sílvia Orriols' party is what most catches the attention, because it could go from nothing to 25 deputies, positioning itself in first place in Girona and Lleida, which demonstrates not only the rightward shift of the electorate, a phenomenon common throughout Europe, but also the defensive turn of a part of the independence movement, which has exchanged the naive illusion of ten years ago for radicalism (fruit of repression and the “rendition” of traditional independence), and also due to the fear of national dissolution as a consequence of demographic changes.

In Parliament, the presence of AC will mean that, on paper, there can be talk of two alternative majorities (that of the right and the pro-independence one) which will never see the light of day precisely because of the crossed vetoes generated by the far-right. This could reassure the central forces of the country, but they must all remain alert because they have serious problems. The Comuns and the CUP, with modest expectations and the winds of history against them; Junts, eroded by AC's success and with a Puigdemont effect on the decline; ERC on the rise, but with a ticking time bomb called Gabriel Rufián; and finally the PSC, strained by the lack of response to the country's structural problems, and especially by the storm that seems to be brewing over the PSOE, to whom it owes a considerable part of its votes.The division of the Catalan electorate into two different national blocs (the Spanish and the Catalan), with a double ideological spectrum, is what turns the country's political situation into a devilish puzzle, and it will continue to do so as long as this structural duality is not addressed for what it is: a reality to which a mature country should respond. After the failure of the Process, the sovereignist volcano is inactive, but not extinguished, and if we are to believe the CEO, it will occupy the majority of the seats in the future Parliament (an unviable majority, but not invisible). As if that were not enough, in the same poll a surprising 45% continue to state that they would vote in favor of independence, and 58% are in favor of Catalonia being an independent state, or federated within Spain. One can pretend that this "unconstitutional" reality does not exist, as the PSC does, but I don't know for how long. Especially if the PP and Vox access the Spanish government. When that happens, turbulence may be inevitable; we will see if the parties of the Catalan centrality, especially those that manage this duality within themselves, are capable of leading a reasonable way out of the country's plurality, or if they will settle for an ostrich policy that at this point can be considered very risky.