Catalonia: what if there's a pragmatic but brutal response?

[JoseB]

@Pleonast

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Based on news reports, it seems like the separatists do not have the fortitude to do it.

That is the understatement of the century.

“We are independent! <8 seconds later> But not really!”

“We will not yield to the imposition from Madrid! <the next day, giving the keys to the central government> Oh well, everybody, obey your new bosses from Madrid!”

“I run away to Belgium! Now I will ask for political asylum! Wait a moment, no, I won’t! And now I am back in Barcelona! Psych!”

This. Is. Ridiculous.

The whole thing has gone way beyond the “Theater of the Absurd” of Eugene Ionesco and has dived headlong into an insane Dali-esque indigestion dream with extra helpings of LSD.

[lisiate]

Personally I’ll take ‘theatre of the absurd’ over armed secessionist conflict any day.

[Nava]

@Go_Arachnid_Laser

And of course we are allowed to vote. In actual elections. elections that last time gave a small Parliamentary majority (not an actual electoral majority… small towns have got a lot more weight here) to the secessionist parties.

One thing that still has me trying to decide whether to cry or scream is a titular I first saw in El Periódico (ok, not surprising to see it there) but later in foreign media, of “according to the polls, Together for Yes would win but not get a majority”.

Goddamnit, if you don’t get a majority you haven’t won!

[Nava]

Back when Mas started this mes (sorry, I had to make the pun, I’ll use “it’s 0353” as my excuse), there was a Letter to the Editor I found interesting. A woman who said “IMO, Mas wasn’t expecting a ‘hell yes’ from anybody and a bare raised eyebrow from the Central Government; his plan was to throw his toys to the floor, get rapidly slapped down and be able to put himself to pasture* wearing an aura of martyrdom.”

I don’t know whether that was the original plan or not, but several of the loudest figures involved in this (Puigdemont, Iglesias, Colau) are either heavily populist or using populist tactics; they’re trying to manipulate whichever audience is in front of them at the moment, and fuck such a thing as actual ideology; at a time when every fart gets recorded and every brainfart gets stored, saying a different thing to one audience at 10am, another at noon and a third over coffee is more likely to cause irritation than get each and every one of those disparate groups to love you.

• Possibly involving the Exec Council of one or more of those “big famous Catalan companies” which have now left town; several of them have multiple ex-politicians on payroll. The bigger the former political job, the lesser the requirements of the pasture position.

[Nava]

@Grim_Render

I don’t think this is the case in Spain. I could be wrong, but I think the armed forces, officers and soldiers are not segregated by which region of Spain they hail form. The people that would be ordered to execute this would be a mix of Catalonians, Basques, Valencians etc with only a minority from Madrid. None of them will have considered this to be a part of their duties before

Yep, yep and yep. In fact, all officers for our armed forces plus Guardia Civil (think US Marshalls) attend the same Academy and get the same degree, in “Organizational Engineering”.

One of the things which throttled ETA was the change in who was immigrant to the Basque areas: for them, a pretty big source was the kind of immigrant who wants to be “more local than the locals”, and when that goes from being Galicians and Castillians to being Serbians, Romanians, Congolese… well, even if our Police Forces were still using the kind of tactics they used in the last decades of the Dictatorship, accusations of “police brutality” would have given those new immigrants the giggles.

And now I’ll go read something else before I end up producing a whole page of posts.

[Go_Arachnid_Laser_1]

@Nava

One thing that still has me trying to decide whether to cry or scream is a titular I first saw in El Periódico (ok, not surprising to see it there) but later in foreign media, of “according to the polls, Together for Yes would win but not get a majority”.

Goddamnit, if you don’t get a majority you haven’t won!

hat are you talking about? This is a multiple party Parliamentary democracy. You can be the party with the most votes (i.e. “Win”) without those votes reaching anything near 50%.

[Nava]

Nope.

Navarre is the only region which has the rule that the government can be formed without 50%+1 of parliamentary votes. In every other region, if you don’t reach 50%+1 you can’t govern; that 50%+1 can come from alliances, but you still can’t say anything but that you’re the biggest party: you’re not the winning party. You can’t govern and you can’t block anything the government wants to do, without 50%+1. And it’s perfectly possible for a governing alliance to not include whomever the biggest party happens to be (hey, look, that’s the current situation in Navarre!).

If you’re a big boy sitting on one side looking on while everybody else plays, you haven’t won.

[Go_Arachnid_Laser_1]

@Nava

Nope.

Navarre is the only region which has the rule that the government can be formed without 50%+1 of parliamentary votes. In every other region, if you don’t reach 50%+1 you can’t govern; that 50%+1 can come from alliances, but you still can’t say anything but that you’re the biggest party: you’re not the winning party. You can’t govern and you can’t block anything the government wants to do, without 50%+1. And it’s perfectly possible for a governing alliance to not include whomever the biggest party happens to be (hey, look, that’s the current situation in Navarre!).

If you’re a big boy sitting on one side looking on while everybody else plays, you haven’t won.

But

1. JxSí aren’t alone. They are forming coalition with the CUP.

2. You can define “winning an election” any way you want. It’s perfectly customary to call the party with the most Parliament seats the winner of the election, regardless of whether they manage to form an Executive afterwards, for most everyone else.

[JoseB]

@Go_Arachnid_Laser

hat are you talking about? This is a multiple party Parliamentary democracy. You can be the party with the most votes (i.e. “Win”) without those votes reaching anything near 50%.

Actually, the situation right now with respect to the position re: independence is very much the equivalent of a two-party situation.

“Together for Yes” is an alliance of parties, not a single one, whose only point in common is (theoretically) wanting to get an independent Catalonia. I mean, in “Together for Yes” you have urban bourgeoisie rubbing shoulders with Venezuelan-style revolutionary socialists…! Honestly, I strongly suspect that if they ever managed to really get in power and really get an independent republic, the next thing they’d do would be to rip each other’s throats with wild abandon.

The other side is firmly against independence, and would seem to be coalescing around the “Citizens” party. This side seems to be more ideologically coherent overall, though.

Those are the two sides that are shaping to be facing off this coming December.

Now - it remains to be seen whether the coalition that went as “Together for Yes” last time will run again; it seems that the inherent tensions within the group are beginning to raise their head. ERC (independentists left of center) may well consider that PdeCAT (kinda-sorta-independentists right of center) have become an electoral liability (PdeCAT -or rather its predecessor- is the party who basically set everything in motion years ago, very likely as a maneuver to distract the people that ran out of control) due to the mess they have made of things (Puigdemont, he of the bipolar wavering, is from PdeCAT). And then you have the CUP, revolutionary socialists crazier than a March hare who ended up at the top riding a wave of angry voters who wanted to punish traditional parties and who are a bunch of intransigent maximalists always shouting “my way or the highway” (one of the leaders of CUP made a charming declaration basically amounting to “Parliament is useless”. These guys are all for a revolution or something; ironically a lot of them are idle kids from rich families, possibly playing at being Che Guevara).

If they go separately to the elections, instead of presenting a unified list, that will hurt their chances (due to the D’Hondt system for proportional voting in use).

Whether the other bloc will unify or not, that remains to be seen. However, were they to do it, I think their internal stresses would not be so high.

EDIT: CORRECTION (but I am leaving up my wrong text above): “Together for Yes” is made of PdeCAT and ERC; CUP is an external support. That changes my analysis; the internal stresses inside “Together for Yes” are less serious than I thought. However, I still feel that PdeCAT might be considered to be a liability by its partners. Also, I think that CUP, running on its on, would basically collapse in the next elections -or, at least, would lose a lot of support.

[Nava]

@Go_Arachnid_Laser

But

1. JxSí aren’t alone. They are forming coalition with the CUP.

2. You can define “winning an election” any way you want. It’s perfectly customary to call the party with the most Parliament seats the winner of the election, regardless of whether they manage to form an Executive afterwards, for most everyone else.

1. So long as they are.

2. At the very least, it gets preceded by an “in theory” or equivalent and said once the reporting goes into analysis of what’s going to happen in the votes to form a government. In a parliamentary system, the objective of parliamentary elections is not to get more votes, or more seats: it’s either “to have our voice heard” (if you have no expectation of actually being part of the government) or “to form part of the government”. The difference between “winning most seats in parliament” and “winning the election” is akin to that between “winning the popular vote” and “becoming POTUS”.

[Go_Arachnid_Laser_1]

@Nava

1. So long as they are.

2. At the very least, it gets preceded by an “in theory” or equivalent and said once the reporting goes into analysis of what’s going to happen in the votes to form a government. In a parliamentary system, the objective of parliamentary elections is not to get more votes, or more seats: it’s either “to have our voice heard” (if you have no expectation of actually being part of the government) or “to form part of the government”. The difference between “winning most seats in parliament” and “winning the election” is akin to that between “winning the popular vote” and “becoming POTUS”.

All that’s irrelevant. Journalists have been calling the party with most Seats the election winner for, at least, as long as I’ve been reading the news. For instance, last General Elections, when PP feared that the Socialists and Podemos could, this time, create a coalition to oust them, they decried that it would be unfair to them, the Election winners.