Jack Davey
Spain is Europe’s left-liberal success story. In the words of the Financial Times, under socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, “Spain has become Europe’s standout economy” chiefly due to immigration.
However, the accolades of this PSOE minority government are ephemeral. The government is held up by separatist parties, caught as the Spanish say, between la espada y la pared — “the sword and the wall”. These separatists are tarnished by association with a socialist government mired in corruption but are unable to do anything. Elections would likely lead to a Spanish nationalist conservative government involving the hard-right Vox party — a nightmare for Catalan and Basque separatists. Pedro Sanchez has relied on this dynamic for almost eight years, but the immigration policy which has caused this growth and foreign adulation may be what brings him down.
“What I ask from the left is less purity and more sense.” That’s how Gabriel Rufián, the leader of Catalunya’s left-wing separatists Esquerra Republica Catalana (ERC), began his address to the Spanish Parliament. This attack on the PSOE government his party keeps in power started off with the normal concerns about the cost of housing, but then something changed. Rufián raised his voice: “We should talk about migration. Yes, migration, stop putting your ear to the ground for five minutes… understand that waves of migration are a challenge for communities.” Rufián is no post-liberal nor has he “left the left”; his speech this week still warned against the “exaggeration by some” of issues over security but the tone remains remarkable. Just a few years ago he declared “there was no wall higher than institutional racism” and railed against ascendant fascism. So what changed?
Rufián is reflecting the realities of a Catalan nationalism in crisis over immigration. Alianca Catalana, a firmly anti-immigration Catalan separatist party, is ascending in the polls every week. The party is led by Silvia Orriols, Mayor of Ripoll, a town in the Pyrenees who infamously described herself as “Catalan and Islamophobic”. Alianca Catalana is polling as the 3rd most popular Catalan separatist party, and Vox themselves were the most popular party for Catalans under 35 in the same survey. Catalans are especially impacted by immigration. Barcelona has a very large Moroccan community and most recent arrivals speak Spanish, not Catalan. Orriols is well beyond the nationalist electoral politics of the UK, declaring she wants a Catalonia “free from the Spanish state, free from the French state, and free from the Islamic state.” This anti-immigration surge is what Rufián is responding to as he says, “Everyone in society has rights and responsibilities no matter if you are called Javier or Brahim.”
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