This Saturday night, many Eurofans who will cheer on Olesana Chanel at Eurovision would have preferred to do it with Rigoberta Bandini’s Ay mama. That song that encourages you to stop the city “sticking your chest out in the pure Delacroix style”. That is to say, as in Liberty Leading the People by the French painter, in which the clear influence of Théodore Géricault and his painting The Raft of the Medusa is recognized. The relationship between this last painting and the current political patio I point out right now.
It has to do with Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès. With Junts and Esquerra. And it is that the painting The Raft of the Medusa is used in criminal law classes to explain the state of necessity. An exemption that protects those who in a situation of need, to avoid their own or another’s harm, have to cause another harm. A lesser evil, it is understood, but bad, after all. And although it may be legitimate, there is no reason to be proud of anything. There are our rulers in Catalonia and in Spain.
The discomfort (and even boredom) that Sánchez projects when agreeing with ERC could not be more revealing. He wants to show that he does it forced. Due to a flagrant state of (extreme) need, his and the country’s. The alternative is a PP government with the extreme right. And so he has to constantly demonstrate that any gesture, little gesture or simulacrum of all this is minimal and the result of having no other way out.
The ERC of Aragonès is in the same, in this case with the pro-independence base in the role of judge who must be convinced. Opt for the PSOE because it is that or suffer from PP and Vox. And it has to emphasize (at the risk of overacting) a chronic discontent and anger. Then, one and the other agree on the essential, which is to stay in power. But they run the risk that no one will end up understanding that they do it for nothing higher, of so much apparent discomfort that they stage day after day.
Sánchez sacrifices the director of the CNI. In everyone’s eyes, it is to create a powerful firewall that satisfies its pro-independence partners. But Sánchez cannot assume it even remotely and Aragonès has to pretend that the gesture is not enough. Neither one gains anything there, only time.
ERC is weighed by the pressure of Junts, and thus makes it noticeable. And the juntaires also have to show their permanent dissatisfaction with a president to whom they must make it clear that they only voted because the alternative was that “those of 155” lead, with or without a tripartite.
In the end, everyone ends up agreeing with the clip on the nose. An unexciting perspective that runs the risk of ending up giving others (those of the greater evil) the letter of the excited and exciting vote. Against the apparent prisoners of the traumas of the past and the fears of the future, PP and Vox can shoot each other in Spain, and in Catalonia other majorities can take over from the independentista to govern. It will have been the merit of those who did not know how or did not want to make of their (state of) necessity a certain virtue.
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