Comment: polarised antagonist forces

How many politicians in Spain would secretly like to fire up militant Catalan separatism to get everyone worked up and arguing again?

I remember chatting to a senator over dinner about ten years ago in Madrid, around the time Podemos was starting to appear on the scene. “This was all much livelier when ETA was around”, they said, off-the-record, of course, implying that there was a certain unifying or concentrating political and media force to be gained from such overt antagonism, which had died down with the demise of the Basque terrorist group. Since then, of course, over this last decade, with the rise of Twitter and then the pandemic globally, and the fracturing of politics and the Catalan separatist crisis in Spain, things have only become even more polarised.