POWER, LIES AND NEGOTIATIONS

Power has some rules that laypeo­ple often miss. As Machi­avelli ex­plained long ago, princes must al­ways pre­sent them­selves as faith­ful and trust­wor­thy yet be ready to de­ceive as often as con­ve­nient, for “men are so sim­ple, and so sub­ject to pre­sent ne­ces­si­ties, that he who seeks to de­ceive will al­ways find some­one who will allow him­self to be de­ceived.”

Power-wield­ers de­ceive eas­ily not only be­cause they os­ten­si­bly have the power to ful­fil their promises (whether they later choose to do so or not), but also be­cause they can use that power to cre­ate “pre­sent ne­ces­si­ties” that they can then offer to sat­isfy – for a price. Thus, in Spain, sev­eral Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence lead­ers were im­pris­oned on trumped-up charges through­out 2017-2018 and then of­fered their par­don as a bar­gain­ing token. Coura­geously, sev­eral of them pub­licly re­jected that their free­dom be bought this way, yet re­cently mem­bers of ERC (Re­pub­li­can Left of Cat­alo­nia) stated that the par­dons had re­sulted from ERC’s ne­go­ti­a­tions – which, at least out­wardly, did not seem to yield any other ben­e­fits.

Po­lit­i­cal re­pres­sion against Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence ac­tivists has reached lev­els un­be­com­ing to any mod­ern democ­racy since 2017. Over 4,000 peo­ple have been vic­tims of law­fare, some al­ready sen­tenced to long prison terms on flimsy ev­i­dence, and even Gon­zalo Boye, the highly ef­fec­tive lawyer of ex­iled Pres­i­dent Puigde­mont, has been ac­cused of money-laun­der­ing in what ap­pears to be ev­i­dence made-up by Spain’s own se­cu­rity ser­vices. The “rule of law” can only exist if the state ma­chin­ery com­mits to ap­ply­ing the law equally to every­one, as op­posed to mak­ing and bend­ing rules for its own ben­e­fit. Sadly, in­sti­tu­tional qual­ity in Spain is too low for this – which be­comes par­tic­u­larly ob­vi­ous when the state faces a chal­lenge like the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence move­ment.

In this con­text, the Span­ish gen­eral elec­tion on 23 July 2023 brought a nov­elty: due to the re­sults’ pe­cu­liar arith­metic, and de­spite the high ab­sten­tion rate among pro-in­de­pen­dence vot­ers, the two main Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence par­ties, ERC and JxC (To­gether for Cat­alo­nia) find them­selves in the po­si­tion to de­cide whether the so­cial­ist PSOE party rules or a re­peat elec­tion takes place – they being un­likely to choose the con­ser­v­a­tive PP party, given its sup­port of even tougher anti-Cata­lan re­pres­sion. Since, for the last few years, ERC was al­ready in this piv­otal po­si­tion but gave its sup­port to PSOE with­out any vis­i­ble re­turn (ex­cept, ac­cord­ing to them, a par­don for some lead­ers), the press seems to take ERC’s sup­port al­most for granted – which leaves JxC, pres­i­dent Puigde­mont’s own party, as king­maker.

It makes for a fas­ci­nat­ing ne­go­ti­a­tion. Un­like ERC, JxC has for years pledged that it would set a high price on its sup­port and, for this elec­tion, promised that only full amnesty and self-de­ter­mi­na­tion would suf­fice. In all like­li­hood PSOE will not get even close to of­fer­ing this (or not cred­i­bly: they have promised a lot but de­liv­ered very lit­tle to Cata­lans in the re­cent past), so the log­i­cal con­clu­sion is a re­peat elec­tion. Es­tab­lish­ment and media pres­sure is of course mount­ing on JxC to bend and sell its vote for noth­ing (or per­haps for some per­sonal ad­van­tages), as ERC did be­fore, but such a be­trayal of its elec­toral pledges would surely dam­age its elec­toral stand­ing – pro-in­de­pen­dence vot­ers al­ready pun­ished ERC heav­ily for just the same be­trayal.

If the Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence par­ties allow them­selves to be de­ceived again, or ac­cept a lousy deal out of fear, they will con­firm to the whole world that they have learnt noth­ing, and in­de­pen­dence will re­main a pipe dream. Yet since 2017 a bru­tally hard les­son has been taught to them, and we can only hope they have fi­nally learnt it.

Opin­ion