The model

Last month the magazines The Economist and Politico Europe each published pieces which claimed that Catalonia would become a political nightmare for Europe in 2017, on the grounds that the Catalan independence movement is yet another post-truth, populist, jingoism-mongering hoax in the same league as, say, UKIP, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, the Front National, and the Movimento 5 Stelle (indeed, Politico places the Catalan president Carles Puigdemont together with Beppe Grillo on its list of 'troublesome' people). The authors of these articles are perhaps unaware that this February will see the Catalan government launch its long-prepared Housing First programme, a pioneering initiative first developed in New York to help homeless people by, well, finding them homes (as opposed to putting them into collective institutions). Meanwhile, the Catalan government will also be uncovering 340 mass graves filled with the victims of the Franco regime and, in another long-term project unique in Spain, will use DNA testing to help surviving family members locate their murdered relatives. And on the 11th of this month, a massive concert will be held in Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi to welcome (and finance) refugees from Syria and other countries to Catalonia; heading the bill are the singer-songwriter Lluís Llach and the actress Sílvia Bel, independentists both (Llach is also an MP in the Catalan parliament). If, in addition to these current events, we recall that the huge pro-indy demonstrations of the last five years have been free of violence and open to all, that the independence movement on both the grass roots and institutional level includes many people born beyond the Spanish borders, that the leaders of all political tendencies within the independence movement have repeatedly stressed that they are not anti-Spanish but rather anti-central government, and that no less than 85% of the Catalan population want a referendum on the independence issue (according to a recent survey by the anti-indy paper El Periódico), one possible conclusion is that not only is Catalonia poles apart from the right-wing populism that is starting to give Europe a funny smell, it is actually something refreshingly new: an inclusive, post-nationalist country that is seeking control over its own affairs using utterly peaceful and democratic means. Far from being a threat, indeed, Catalonia is a potential role model that the rest of Europe could follow if only it could get its nose out of the nativist trough. No wonder that here, the pro-indy bloc is opposed so viscerally by two allied parties in the Catalan parliament: Ciudadanos (an ideologically wobbly grouping whose main and perhaps only policy is to make Catalonia less Catalan by making it more Spanish); and the unpopular Popular Party (made up of straightforward Spanish-nationalist conservatives). If the word 'populist' can be applied to any political formation in Catalonia, these two are surely the chief candidates.