The phoenix and the swan

L'Informe Fènix presented this month, which warns of the impoverishment of Catalans due to our way of growing (and which confirms that our growth style is now a kind of malignant tumor), must henceforth form the basis of all political, social, civic or business action. It is a serious, grave, urgent, truth-filled wake-up call, because we are all feeling it on our skin and we don't need much proof (even though until now no one had given us the diagnosis and prognosis). The decline is totally perceptible, uncontainable, both in the political and social spheres and, therefore, inevitably, this ends up having its economic effects. We have lost our drive, partly for external reasons, but also for internal reasons and our own renunciations (or neglects), and the result is that Catalonia now seems to be unable to count on either an efficient ruling class or a business fabric that reaches where the government cannot. Until now, one thing had always compensated for the other. Now, on the other hand, the ground is barren, the landscape is a dry meadow with a cow squeezed to the point of hemorrhage, and, in the spiritual aspect, the demoralization is as general and clamorous as it is apparently inconsolable. Distributing blame is necessary, yes, but above all it will be necessary to distribute blame from now on, and specifically towards those who do not react.

Politically, I believe that the decline began on October 2, 2017. However you think, however you vote, whether you are for or against the Process, its “resolution” or “normalization” has left trust between electors and elected at abysmal levels. I already said it in my day, in response to someone as close as Mas-Colell: if a people is told that it cannot aspire to everything it sets out to do (democratically, inclusively, and peacefully), its self-esteem runs the risk of falling into a bottomless pit. A depression can be overcome, but some depressions can become chronic. The fact is that, once Article 155 was applied, Catalonia has moved towards an unprecedented legalistic, administrative, officialist, and almost authoritarian political conception that is summarized in the idea that we are an autonomy and that's it. A flat autonomy, like La Rioja, like Castile and León; a system of governance without uniqueness and without claim, without imagination and without an imaginary; without a soul. They took care of it as soon as they renamed El Prat airport and have continued to promote it through public media, official speeches, physical symbolism, and periodic renunciation. Now it turns out that everything is about a ring train. A ring train that is undoubtedly 100% autonomous and regional politics, in contrast to that poster of the train tracks that invited us to take destiny by the throat and decide it collectively. Nine years of accelerated political decline, plummeting, in freefall. It will be very difficult to get up, both out of fear and laziness. Also for lack of talent, I fear. Let's hope that we are (according to the report's title) facing a phoenix, that is, the bird that is reborn from the ashes (and which was used a lot in the time of the Renaixensa) and not facing the swan song of an entire nation. The transition from one to the other is very, very narrow, and it will depend on whether Catalans react, each from their own sphere, or not.

Economically, what we said: a growth model that allows us to say that we have stable vital signs but does not allow us to get out of bed. Companies sold to foreign groups, poor management of immigration (poor and rich), loss of the productive small business model, lack of rootedness of shops and industries, awarding of all possible prosperity to the tourism or service sector with very low wages, lack of protection for the autochthonous population regarding access to housing, aspirations for civil service or highly subsidized careers, loss of the references of great businessmen, of which Catalonia had so boasted... I don't know if it's a coincidence, but the two major cultural investments that Barcelona has recently experienced have come from a baroness and a marquis. It says nothing against them, undoubtedly, but it says something against the famous Catalan bourgeois tradition.

I insist: there are countries that can survive without a cause and just by getting by. Catalonia, no. It's the same difference between aspiring to maintain permanence in the First Division or winning the League and being able to aim for the Champions League. Oh: and humiliating Madrid, when possible, obviously.