Photo by Rémi Jacquaint on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ´El retorno de lo Pre-político´. Jorge del palacio. El Mundo. 15th May 2018 The Catalan process has served to many to discover Quim Torra. He is a politician who feels comfortable in a discursive register that seems to draw on Gobineau, the notorious author of An Essay on the […]
Categoría: Voices From Spain
Estat Català: the sewer
Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ´Estat català: la alcantarilla´. Xavier Vidal-Folch. El País. 14th May 2018 The candidate to become Catalan president, Quim Torra, is an admirer of the leaders of Estat Català and he attends their homages: the Badia brothers are “the best examples of independentism”, he said in 2011. In 2014 he […]
The bifurcation strategy
Photo by Tim Scharner on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ‘La estrategia de la bifurcación’. Lola García. La Vanguardia. 13th May 2018 Apparently, Quim Torra’s speech as aspiring Catalan president presages a bigger clash with the central government, following the wake set by Carles Puigdemont from abroad. Also, in theory, Rajoy’s cabinet, spurred by competition from Ciudadanos, won’t […]
Puigdemont, 130.5th President of Catalonia
Photo by Paweł Furman on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ´Cataluña 130,5º ‘president’ Puigdemont´ J. Ignacio Torreblanca. El País. 25th Jan 2018 Incisive though her questions were, professor Marlene Wind could have asked her interlocutor about the title (130th president of the Government of Catalonia) used by the Department of Political Science of the University of Copenhagen to introduce […]
Can the use of article 155 be extended?
Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ´¿Puede prorrogarse la aplicación del 155?´ Javier García Fernández. El País. 14th May 2018 It’s legally not possible to extend the legal situation in Catalonia, much as we may suspect they’re back to the secessionist adventures. After listening to Torra and the secessionist speakers, many people believe that the […]
The decadent ventriloquist in Berlin
Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. ‘El decadente ventrílocuo de Berlín’ Javier Ayuso. El País. 15th May 2018 Carles Puigdemont is wrong if he believes he’s always going to be able to pull the strings on Quim Torra, the new Catalan president. The scene that will unfold today in Berlin (with […]
Either racists or Europeans
Photo by Evelyn Bertrand on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish. “O racistas o europeos”. Carlos Yárnoz. El País. 18th May 2018 The election of a racist president makes the Catalan regional government the antithesis of the values held by the EU, that club that was to welcome the illusory republic with open arms according to […]
Fabbrica di nazioni
Photo by Marie Bellando-Mitjans on Unsplash Originale: “Fábrica de naciones”. Antonio Elorza. El País. 2nd May 2018 Da strumento di comunicazione, la lingua diventa la chiave di un potere politico illegittimo. In una conferenza tenuta anni fa, un arguto politologo catalano, oggi scomparso, voleva chiarire davanti al suo pubblico di Alicante cosa fosse la lingua nazionale. […]
Torra, the activation of ethnocentrism and the ‘mambo’
Originally published in Spanish. «Torra, la activación del etnicismo y el mambo». Pau Marí-Klose. Agenda Pública. 14th May 2018 Catalonia is a fragile object, as Oriol Bartomeus recently recalled in an excellent post. As in many other places, history has assembled fragments without completely fusing them, leaving behind scars that remind us of the effort […]
November 9th: an ignored warning
Photo by Felix Russell-Saw on Unsplash Originally published in Spanish: “El 9N: un aviso que no se atendió”. Editorial. El Mundo. That the secessionist process required a complex criminal web is not doubted even by its promoters, whose internal documents warned clearly about the unavoidable clash with the state that the disconnection project entailed. What the […]