Will Catalonia follow the path of Saxony?

The election results in Saxony-Anhalt have fallen like a bucket of cold water on the whole of Germany and Europe. The continental far-right wave, which at one point seemed to be slowing down, has suddenly returned to the heart of Nazi amnesia. And it has received the applause of Trump-Musk-Putin. The AfD is pro-Kremlin and wants support for Ukraine to stop. The worst ghosts of anti-democratic xenophobia hover over the Old Continent.

History never repeats itself, but sometimes it looks suspiciously similar. The parallel between what is happening in Germany and what happened there a century ago, during the Weimar Republic, when the serpent's egg was hatched, is not only legitimate, but necessary. Yes, of course, times have changed, the role of Russia is different (it is no longer the Bolshevik threat, it is the authoritarian imperial threat), global immigration did not exist before, the economic crisis does not have the same depth as that of the 1929 Crash, etc. Even so, there are equivalences that it would be naive to ignore.

Catalonia is not immune to the sinister air of current times. Here too, a stark anti-humanist discourse, of social Darwinism, of identity purism, of fierce individualism, and of questioning the rule of law, is thriving happily at the hands of the two far-right parties (Aliança Catalana and Vox). Xenophobic populism is gaining ground and is knocking out the meritorious inclusive Catalanism, both Pujolian and Maragallian, despite the differences between the two leaders. The feeling of national defeat and class defeat (of the middle class), both based on verifiable facts, is being perfectly exploited by the illiberal extreme right, which puts social cohesion (coexistence between different people) and pluralistic democracy itself at risk.

This year's Diada has been marked by this ultra-right rise. To what extent will involution triumph? This is what is at stake in the next electoral cycle. The polls paint a worrying picture, with a Catalonia that could be positioned at the forefront of the European extreme right. If in Saxony-Anhalt the AfD has taken 44% of the votes, here the sum of Aliança Catalana and Vox in the worst of the demographic scenarios could reach the same level. The national divide between the two formations would surely mean a blockage when it comes to forming a government, but it would also prevent any alternative majority. We would be entering unknown territory.

In Saxony-Anhalt they already know what the far-right means and, even so, they have voted for it. In 1932, in the then Free State of Anhalt (the state of Saxony-Anhalt is later), the NSDAP, Hitler's party, obtained 41% of the votes and formed a government with the monarchist nationalist right. For the first time, a Nazi leader was placed at the head of an executive. In a few months, before the summer, Hitler's followers were already in the governments of five states and directed two of them. The traditional right, adrift, hesitated between adopting the Nazi discourse or seeking a difficult centrality. The radical left (then communist) confronted the SA and SS in the streets, and the social democratic left opposed them from the precarious coalition governments or centrist majorities, but it did not succeed. All in all, just like today.

I do not know how mature the penetration of the AfD is throughout Germany, but it is enough to be nervous. From here, those of Sílvia Orriols and Abascal have greeted the success of the AfD with euphoria. They are united by distrust in Europe and in democracy, the rejection of equal opportunities and of respect for cultural and religious differences. The AfD's program is stark. It proposes creating citizen patrols as street shock forces, it wants to overcome what it defines as a "guilt complex" for the Nazi past (guilt?, what guilt?, they only caused 15 million deaths). What the Jews represented a century ago, as internal enemies of the fatherland (and of the race), is now represented by immigrants, especially Muslims (enemies of Western civilization), whom they want to see forcibly and massively expelled. The AfD advocates for cutting off all public funding for reception, which they label as an “asylum business”. We could go on... They are scary.

Let us hope that Catalonia does not go down the same path as Saxony-Anhalt.