Musical chairs explained

A few months ago, the ex-King of Spain (the one who broke his leg while try­ing to cull the ele­phant pop­u­la­tion of Botswana) con­fessed to a French TV crew that the last words a dying Franco spoke to him were “The only thing I ask of you is to pre­serve the unity of Spain”. So it wasn't the Com­mies or the So­cial­ists that vexed the old fas­cist, but only the thought that the Cata­lans and Basques might slip the His­panic pad­dock. In this (as in most other things) Franco was any­thing but orig­i­nal: at least since the late 17th cen­tury, all pre­vi­ous Span­ish heads of state had all fret­ted to var­i­ous de­grees over these two pe­riph­eral thorns in their Castil­ian­ist sides. Today it is the Cata­lan thorn in par­tic­u­lar which has be­come es­pe­cially painful, given that the 17 pro-indy Cata­lan MPs in the Span­ish par­lia­ment have be­come the key which would make a non-in­cum­bent Span­ish gov­ern­ment pos­si­ble: a coali­tion be­tween any two of the Span­ish par­ties plus the votes of said Cata­lan MPs (which would be granted in­stantly in ex­change for a Scot­tish-style ref­er­en­dum) would allow a gov­ern­ment to be formed in Spain. To­mor­row. In­deed, five years of mas­sive demon­stra­tions in­volv­ing up to 2.5 mil­lion Cata­lans in a coun­try of just over 7, plus the cur­rent pro-in­de­pen­dence ma­jor­ity in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment, would surely jus­tify a pacted ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence, even if the fu­ture of Spain's gov­ern­ment wasn't hang­ing in the bal­ance. But the four main Span­ish par­ties are hav­ing none of it. The Pop­u­lar Party (PP), its ranks dot­ted with crypto-Fran­coist throw­backs (their palms shiny with grease) will not con­tem­plate mak­ing any pro-Cata­lan con­ces­sions what­so­ever; nor will Ciu­dadanos (C's), a union­ist party founded in Barcelona in 2006 by a se­lect group of Cata­lan in­tel­lec­tu­als whose main con­cern is that too much Cata­lan is being spo­ken in Cat­alo­nia. (In the Cata­lan par­lia­ment they con­sis­tently vote with the PP, but in Madrid, where they have been a major force only since 2014, they have put a su­per­fi­cially lib­eral spin on their an­tics). The Span­ish So­cial­ist Party (PSOE) did ac­tu­ally use to be a so­cial­ist party, back in the day, but is now a con­ven­tional cen­tre-cen­tre force which is (rightly) wor­ried it will lose some of its more Cata­lanopho­bic power bases in Spain should its Gen­eral Sec­re­tary make so much as a sin­gle over­ture to the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment. The fourth main party, Podemos – which has a hand­ful of gen­uinely so­cial­ist pro­pos­als in its pro­gramme - would, in the­ory, ac­cept a ref­er­en­dum on Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence, which is pre­cisely why the PSOE and C's won't touch Podemos with a barge­pole. As things stand, then – un­less a mir­a­cle has taken place be­fore this goes to press – a third round of Span­ish state-wide elec­tions will have to be held around Christ­mas time, amidst flow­ing cava, roast­ing poul­try and drip­ping slabs of Yule­tide nougat. As the few An­ar­chists still left in Cat­alo­nia might say: there's no gov­ern­ment like no gov­ern­ment .