The acting Spanish government spokesperson, Isabel Celaá, has asked the right-wing Partido Popular and Ciudadanos to vote in Pedro Sánchez as new prime minister as a service to Spain. It's a way of telling the conservatives that governance is not a question of right or left but rather of preventing Podemos and, in particular, the Catalan independence parties, from having any margin for political negotiation.
Spanish constitutionalism has always been clear about its red lines, quite apart from the unbearable noise that politics has produced in recent times which has acted as a filter on the truth on many occasions. The imposition of article 155 in 2017 could not have taken place without this premise of "giving everything for Spain", and neither could the violence on 1st October that year. Nor could the Supreme Court trial and its remarkable trajectory, nor the recent action of Spain's Central Electoral Board, nor the behaviour of Barcelona's Court 13, nor...
This idea of State, which unifies all parties of right and left when they are called on to give what Celaá defines as a service to Spain, is behind many of the mistakes that have been made in Madrid since the beginning of the Catalan independence process. Actions by force before negotiation and dialogue. For this reason, the independence movement, more than any other political space, needs its voters to ratify their support at the ballot box. It happened in the elections in April when the electoral map of Spain, largely painted red by the Socialist victories, had a completely different colour in Catalonia, with the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) becoming the largest party in terms of both seats and votes.
Now, with the municipal and European elections just ahead next Sunday, the independence movement once again has to turn out massively to ensure there can be no mistake in the interpretation of the results. At stake is enormous municipal power, as well as the chance for Catalonia's capital city to stop turning its back on the Catalan government and for the two sides of Plaça Sant Jaume to go hand in hand.
But also in play on 26th May is whether combined support for the pro-independence tickets will reach a milestone that up till now has not been achieved at any election and that is, to top 50% of the total vote. The El Nacional-Feedback survey that we published last Wednesday focusing on Barcelona showed that breaking this barrier was possible, since the sum of the two candidatures led by Puigdemont and Junqueras was slightly above the magic figure. It is an image which would bury a few simplistic myths and would lay down an enormous political imprint for the future.