13 October 2012

How to Win the Catalan Election

I am willing to vote for Catalan independence. "Willing" does not mean "will": I have conditions. If these conditions are met, those parties which have invested themselves in the case for sovereignty may win a clear majority. My conditions are these:
  1. I ask to be told what's in the package: I need a list of ingredients on the box. Pro-independence sentiment stems from something that Catalans have in common with other Spaniards: deep dissatisfaction with the political institutions and political conduct arising from Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s. If independence means a calque of those same institutions and conduct--e.g. an electoral system that fosters cronyism and distance between the electorate and the elected, politics as a closed shop, and the absence of freedom-of-information legislation--Catalans will have sentenced themselves to another crisis of faith, with no-one to blame but themselves, just down the road. My first condition, then, is that independence have political content above and beyond sovereignty. That means public consultations and referenda on new political arrangements--levels of government, electoral processes, the regulation and funding of political parties, arms-length regulation of such matters are broadcasting, and guarantees of openness in public administration. That means that the range of possible arrangements should be part of the debate on sovereignty. 
  2. I ask for symbolic presence in the political process. Nearly 16% of the population is foreign. Many others are the children of newcomers, or newcomers themselves who have become citizens of Spain. A still greater part of the population is made up of migrants from elsewhere in Spain and their descendents. When a historically significant political party runs a slate of candidates whose surnames are almost exclusively Catalan, its aspiration to represent the whole of this society is compromised. (Perhaps it holds no such aspiration and is restrictively ethnolinguistic in scope, as Jacques Parizeau implied his own party was at the time of the 1995 Québec referendum.) Ideally  the election would see a far more representative group of Catalans take up their seats in the legislature. If that is not the case--and the electoral system makes it very unlikely--the parties advocating sovereignty should enlist independents from civil society groups representing both waves of immigrants, those of the 1950s and 1960s, and those of the first decade of this century. 




4 comments:

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  2. Brett Hetherington said...

    Your two conditions make perfect sense to me, Junius.

    I've been asked to attend a round table conference about the future of politics in Barcelona this month, and the points you make about immigrant involvement in the political process and the need for any independence to also include deep institutional/behavioural change are exactly the kinds of thing I plan to bring up.

    I suspect that some people prefer the convenience of simple slogans like “Freedom”(from what? or to do what? I have to ask.)

    Catalaunya, like so much of the world, is very badly governed and as you so rightly said, without far-reaching and genuine change they will “have sentenced themselves to another crisis of faith, with no-one to blame but themselves, just down the road.”

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  3. Many thanks for your comments, Brett. I am glad to hear that these points will be brought up in a public forum. I've started to check the lists of candidates for those parties which have made them public and see no evidence that the current party is trying to draw newcomers into the political process. (To be fair, the PSC did in the last election, but their candidates were drawn from civil society groups which they'd funded when in government. It made me more suspicious that those groups were examples of the party system colonising ostensibly neutral civil society than glad that an Argentine, a Moroccan, and a Colombian were candidates.)

    I neglected to mention in my post that I am and remain a federalist, but see no chance that federalism will prosper here.

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  4. CiU's lists of candidates have been published to their website: see http://www.ciu.cat/media/76540.pdf. While Catalan surnames predominate very heavily, there is more diversity after the fiftieth name on the list for the province of Barcelona.

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