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.
The separatist crisis in 2017 was a media monster: five years of working everyone up over the possibility of an actual whole historic declaration of independence from Spain. Would Mas (first) and Puigdemont (later) really go for it? Really go all that way? A giant question mark, a giant piece of narrative tension gold running for years through Spanish politics, a polarising suggestion around which politicians on all sides could make ever stronger statements about how right they were, and how wrong the others. And the media loved it for the same reason: all of that unknown mystery tension and conflict, building to an absolute fever pitch in October of that year.
It all got out of hand a bit, and not only with the politics side itself, with everyone egging everyone else on from polarised trenches that no-one could really budge from, there was no real escape hatch when it came down to it, at least none that either side felt they could take honourably. There was also a moment when it slipped from politicians’ control socially: in those very tense weeks that October, all of a sudden videos started surfacing from WhatsApp around the nation, with Spaniards in the rest of the country cheering on the police and Civil Guard as they raced north to stop the Catalan separatists.
Vox began its rise on the back of its position against the separatists in 2018, there was more intense interest during the trial at the Supreme Court in 2019, and there was some attention paid of course to the pardons later on, but in the meantime it all died down and went quiet compared to where we were in 2017. Until this summer and the general election and the fact that Puigdemont now holds the key to Sánchez being reappointed PM. So I wonder how many political operators, the sneaky House of Cards types, in Madrid and Barcelona, are now chatting to other political operators, or perhaps even whispering to journalists, that maybe it would be fun and politically interesting to fire it all up again, to give militant Catalan separatism a new lease of life, something to give everyone to chew on again.
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