To manage to disguise the Hispanization

Salvador Illa's insistence on his will and capacity for good governance by the Government serves to conceal the president's great underlying mission: to denationalize Catalonia in order to subtly and docilely incorporate it into the Spanish nation. It is the exact opposite of that well-known saying when the wise man points to the Moon, the fool looks at his finger. Here, the president shrewdly insists that we look at the finger—I don't know if by making us play the fool—so that he can wisely and without much hindrance work to achieve the Moon.

This is a legitimate strategy insofar as no one can say that the president Salvador Illa's true political ambition was not known. Those who returned their vote to the PSC, lost during the Procés, and which had gone to Ciutadans as a guarantee of Catalonia's Spanishness, knew this well. The disappearance of the party does not mean that its spirit has vanished. And those who made his presidency and government possible also had to know this. All to avoid the risk that, in a new electoral call, they would end up losing everything. Furthermore, it is true that ensuring good governance, like the one Illa wants, would be a very good way to strengthen a project that has a historical vocation. At the time, the independence movement also intended to show that with good governance "of the Republic"—does anyone remember that rhetoric?—the secessionist option would be legitimized. And neither one nor the other.

However, without delving into essentialist disquisitions about what it means to be Catalanist, what is clear is that there is a radical shift in relation to what had been the traditional strategy of resigned political Catalanism. Thus, instead of wanting to Catalanize Spain in order to find the best possible fit there, Illa proposes to do so by Spanishizing Catalonia. The aim is for Spain to lose its fear of a certain—or uncertain—Catalan identity and for Catalans to feel comfortable with Spanishness. I won't say it's an easy objective, because Spanish anti-Catalanism and Catalanophobia have a long historical trajectory that will be difficult to erase. And because the independence movement, also with long roots, will not be easy to completely sideline, however low its fortunes may be at the moment.

The space in which resistance to Salvador Illa's political project becomes especially clear is where political identification is expressed most openly and clearly, precisely because it is systematically masked as being political. I am talking, of course, about sport and, particularly, about football: about making the World Cup —here too— a focus of patriotism as exacerbated as it is popular; about how fansreceive Catalan players in many stadiums, about how the Spanish police identify an estelada as a gesture of reprehensible hatred, or still about the return —for a day— of the estelades to the stands. Everything makes the blatant political dimension of sport clear, as Scottish sociologists had already shown for the whole of the European sphere in Sport and national Identity in the European Media (1993), among them my friend Hugh O'Donnell from Glasgow Caledonian University. Here and everywhere, media policies of national identity and their battles are fought not so much in political information as in sports pages and programs.

On the other hand, President Illa's horizon has a smoother path in the area of institutional discourse and in the media — public and private — that feel comfortable with his political project. We see this in the reception of the idea of celebrating this year's Onze de Setembre in Extremadura and each year in a different autonomous community. It is a brilliant proposal for making visible this search — if not obsessive, then obstinate — to be loved — and forgiven — in Spain. The objective has been made explicit by the president himself in the interview with El Periódico: to thank there the contribution of the Extremadurans from here to Catalan society and, incidentally, to focus on the links between territories to underline "what unites us." In short: the Spanish nation. A Hispanizing project, Illa's, also explicit when our government is among the first to offer to generously contribute to resolving the migratory crisis in Ceuta, a gesture justified with good humanitarian arguments, but undoubtedly aimed at showing us as more solidarily Spanish than anyone.

The political instinct and ability of President Salvador Illa cannot be denied or underestimated. Wanting to overcome that unsatisfactory and old resigned narrative of conllevancia for one that promises to overcome mistrust and seek reconciliation, in a disoriented and morally weak society like ours, is a winning bet. And, however, if facts do not help him...