The fact that, just as the Spanish Congress's justice committee has approved the amnesty bill, the People's Party (PP), Vox and Ciudadanos (Cs) have managed to draw, this Sunday, around 500 people to Plaça de Sant Jaume in Barcelona to protest against it, clearly demonstrates that acceptance of the issue among Spanish nationalism in Catalonia is not what we are told. The noise made by the right may be received as significant in Madrid, perhaps in Andalusia, Extremadura and Spain's two Castiles, but not in many other places.
Sometimes there are actions that judges take in Madrid, or things that political parties do in their headquarters in the Spanish capital, or by the media subsidized in Isabel Díaz Ayuso's autonomous community, be they newspapers, radio stations or TV channels: sometimes these things are confused with the concerns of the people. About 500 people, according to Barcelona's Guàrdia Urbana, is really very few. It is a number that demands observation and reflection, seriously, on whether this is the path that the Spanish right should follow in Catalonia. There can be no greater rejection by the electorate than absenteeism in the face of such a fundamental issue which has long occupied front pages and even more front pages.
It goes further: it is very likely that, if the right were to add up its public officials and party members, it would come to quite a lot more than the 500 people who came this Sunday morning to protest in the political nerve centre of Catalonia. But even if this is an irrefutable truth, Spanish nationalism has no intention of lowering this flag and is ready to repeat the mistakes of the past. Those errors that brought the PP to a marginal position in Catalan politics: poor results and the permanent impossibility of aspiring to be part of governing political majorities. Its only institutional figures, the mayors of Badalona, Xavier García-Albiol, and of Castelldefels, Manuel Reyes, learned this lesson a long time ago and look at the party from a cautious and polite middle distance.
The right is ready to repeat the mistakes of the past, which brought the PP to a marginal position in Catalan politics
But Madrid and the Spanish right need to live off a certain level of anti-Catalanism that also fluctuates depending on the needs. History always repeats itself: there is nothing easier in the Spanish capital than attacking Catalan identity. Sometimes it is the language, sometimes the culture and always the nation. Their anti-Catalanism feeds back into itself, without any understanding that measures such as the amnesty, leaving aside the debates over its precise wording, find broad support in society as a whole and an equally intense rejection from the intolerant sectors that prefer politics to be the judicialized, and for the judges to be the ones who decide what the public wants and what can and cannot be done.