Of all the fourteen elections that have been held in Catalonia since 1980, this one on May 12th is undoubtedly the strangest. The election that is most difficult to make predictions about, since it is impossible to know, despite the fact that there are only ten days left, the extent to which it has been espanyolitzada - focused onto Spanish, rather than Catalan, issues - after all the previous elections to the Catalan Parliament have been tightly wrapped in a package that had as its sole addressee Catalonia. This has led, like nowhere else, to analyses and a multitude of political books on the duality of the vote that occurs here: the electorate behaves with a much more Spanish orientation when it comes to electing representatives to the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, but exhibits a much more Catalanist viewpoint when the elections are in the Parliament of Catalonia. For this reason, the results are always different, although the time interval between one election and the next are sometimes not very long.
The Sánchez earthquake, which no-one has any doubt about, since it is based on a magnificently well-designed operation in which Catalan voters have been collectively used like guinea pigs, and in which we ended up taking the bait like simpletons, has altered the discourse of the election campaign without having managed to impact squarely on the only three things that matter on May 12th: which party wins the elections, which government alliances are possible and which parliamentary majorities are produced at the polls between the Spanish unionst and Catalan independence blocs and in the sum of the left-wing parties. Seeing Pedro Sánchez these days, perfectly recovered from the personal catharsis over his political future, perhaps there should be ongoing reminders that he is not actually running in the elections, despite the catalogue of magic tricks and optical illusions he shows us, from which people could end up thinking otherwise.
The Sánchez earthquake has altered the discourse of the election campaign without having managed to impact squarely on the only three things that matter on May 12th
At the mid-point of the campaign, he has told us that it is worth staying on as PM, that the right must be unmasked (Feijóo and Abascal) and that he is eternally indebted to the PSC, which received him with mass veneration. Not a word about why the Rodalies suburban trains work so badly in Catalonia, or about a reform of autonomous community funding, much less about Catalonia's fiscal deficit. Not to mention the chronic deficit in compliance with infrastructure investments that appear in the state's general budget. None of this, and it's not because the issues have emerged in recent months and there hasn't been time to be able to draft a specific proposal that would satisfy Catalonia. The review of the autonomous financing system, which is exclusively his and his government's responsibility, reached the milestone of ten years since it expired on January 1st. By way of comparison, the General Council of the Judiciary, which is talked about so much - and I am not at all saying that this is without a motive - at the end of this year will have been expired for six years, a little more than half of the period since the funding agreement had to be replaced.
Why does everyone talk about the first matter while the second seems of interest to no one but the Catalans? Why hasn't Pedro Sánchez made a proposal to bring to an end this unjust situation that suffocates the coffers of the Generalitat of Catalonia and, in the end, means there are fewer hospitals, schools, libraries, clinics, public housing for young people and so many other things? And if we go back to what is the Spanish state's historical debt to Catalonia, in November last year Parliament calculated that it had reached the staggering figure of 456 billion euros, the equivalent of a Spanish budget. I understand that, regarding all this, nobody in Madrid wants to talk about it and that Pedro Sánchez prefers to walk through this Catalan campaign talking about Feijóo and Abascal, who, by the way, are not running either. But from here, these explanations must be demanded of him.