The tradition of splits
Catalan independence has always lived on splits. Political movements that aspire to transform the system in one way or another, by their essence, tend to question everything, and this tendency ends up consuming them. But Catalonia has reached a point where it is necessary to talk about nuclear fragmentation. As in this process used to generate the much-discussed nuclear energy, each movement that is generated splits a nucleus into two smaller ones and the resulting resentment can repeat the operation in other nuclei. So to infinity.
The war in the ANC
It is happening right now around the Catalan National Assembly (ANC). While the current management strives to push forward the civic list – which will already fragment the electoral space -, two groups of ex-leaders face off, one in favor of Dolors Feliu and Uriel Bertran’s proposal and the other, against. An internal war within the framework of one of the sides of civil independence, which already started from the de facto break with the other major organization of the ecosystem, Omnium Cultural.
The competition between the parties
Meanwhile, the parties, which are presumed to be responsible for the frustration that the promoters of the civic list want to solve, remain on the sidelines of this whole movement, immersed in competing with each other in a battle to the death for the hegemony of a pro-independence electoral space that is getting narrower every day. Together for Catalonia believes that Esquerra Republicana has won the game in controlling the story about the position that must be maintained in Madrid. But the Republicans are convinced that this soufflé will go down – helped by the visible and endless internal disputes in Carles Puigdemont’s party – and are already preparing for the great battle of the elections next year. They hope to win it by exhibiting the experience of Pere Aragonès in the management of the Generalitat post 1-O, a card that they think no joint candidate could play, and least of all their top leader, if he returned with amnesty, after six years of exile without contact with the institution.
The bottom line
The question here is not who is right, if anyone is right. Independence has set out to fragment its own political space with the argument that unitarism is illusory and ineffective and that the only solution is for one to win and the others to shut up or, if possible, disappear. Without taking into account that this goal seems even more difficult than independence itself and that the only time the movement has achieved anything has been by forcing unity.
