That the Spanish Constitution is an outdated relic is an opinion which half of all Spaniards currently agree with, as do three quarters of Catalans with the right to vote, and a fairly similar proportion of Basques. The 1978 document is defended tooth and nail by the far right, found today in three parties, the Popular Party (PP), Vox and Ciudadanos (Cs), heirs of those who when it was drafted did least to support it, because they were doing well under the system that had existed up till then.
The Socialists propose its reform when they are in opposition and forget about it when they govern, with the public excuse that it is impossible to make any change when, in reality, what they end up doing is acting as guarantors of the regime of '78. Pedro Sánchez has already forgotten, with the velocity that characterizes him, his former commitments, and a reform is neither on the horizon nor expected to appear. At his side, Unidas Podemos helps to confuse the issue without placing reform among its own government priorities.
It is not surprising that in this mass of interests - rigidity, uniformity, monolingualism and a shift to the right - political Catalanism is becoming more and more distant. The stance taken by Felipe VI in October 2017 made many see that the Constitution had definitively become a cage. The sentences against the pro-independence leaders imposed by the Supreme Court, the exile of president Carles Puigdemont and a number of his cabinet ministers as well as the judicial persecution of several thousand independence supporters, together with the impunity that the police forces have ended up having in imposing repression, has moved a very large majority of Catalan society past the point of no return.
If we add to this the fact that it has served as protection for the Spanish monarchy's corruption, it is not at all strange how Spain's supreme legal document has evolved in the eyes of public opinion. If in 1978, the Constitution was the lowest common denominator for a political class who were, no doubt, frightened by constant sabre-rattling, today it is an obsolete instrument that is not respected even by those who claim to defend it daily. They take advantage of it, which is something else.
This Monday I read a tweet from Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo praising Josep Tarradellas for a document belonging to the former Catalan president, exhibited in his Poblet archive, showing the vote on the 1978 Constitution in Spain and in Catalonia, with the highest percentage of votes in favour found in the second. The great Josep Tarradellas, says Cayetana. She has been a candidate for the PP, heir to that Alianza Popular that opposed Tarradellas's return to Catalonia from his French exile. It's just as well we have history, because otherwise, any fabrication would be possible.