In the State as a whole, and much more in Catalonia, sympathy towards the monarchical institution continues to decline. Surprising figures after decades of domination by the apologists of the Transition. Intellectuals and politicians of all conditions who nor did they engage in a critical debate nor did they ever accept that the current monarchical regime was built with second-rate materials, the product of the pact with the elites of the dictatorship. I know more, they insisted on turning the Transition into a model of excellence to be exported. The reality, however, is that, except for Chile, no other State used the Transition as a pattern and in the Chilean case the model of impunity imported from Spain was initially shaken after the victory in 1999 of Ricardo Lagos. And today, the Spanish political system born in 1978 has begun to suffer the consequences, as evidenced by the lack of democratic potential to face the challenges of the 21st century, all of them transcendental, global and immediate. Deficits that condition the quality of institutions and the production model, unable to find a place in the new world division of labour, putting in check the sustainability of the minimum distribution of wealth that the social and welfare state has entailed.
Notices were ignored: from the presence of a single head of state (the dictator Teodoro Obiang) at the funeral of Adolfo Suárez, in 2014 to grotesque armor of the king emeritus, going through the police repression of 1-O. A Spanish state that, unlike what was undertaken jointly by the CDU and the SPD in order to ‘denazify’ and ‘de-Prussianize’ German society, chose to trivialize, through impunity, the long Franco dictatorship and resigned from the LOAPA post23-F to move from the autonomous composite State to the resolution of national conflicts. In conclusion, no deep break with Francoism and, consequently, the presence of a ‘deep state’ that easily (sewers!) is externalized from the democratic functioning of the State itself. And, to finish it off, normalization of Vox as a useful crutch to guarantee Feijóo’s probable victory.
Neither break with the Francoist past, then, nor ‘decastellanization’. Indeed, the imaginary that associates Catalans with ‘internal enemies’ still remains in millions of Spanish citizens. Historical phenomenon already coined in pre-industrial times, fed back by the nineteenth-century debates between free traders and protectionists, increased by the dictatorships of the twentieth century and universalized by the ‘procés’.
Paradoxically, currently a Republican alternative at the state level it is presented as essential, considering the discredit of the Crown and the increasingly evident impasse of the current Spanish democratic system, as incipient because, except in Catalonia, republicanism is still remaking itself from years of ostracism suffered as a second ‘post-Transition’ internal exile.
A scenario that the Spanish left would have to see as an opportunity, in the face of the danger of growth of reactionary or nihilistic populism. Lead a republican literacy that associate republicanism with modernity and overcome the inevitable historicist bias to which republicanism has been forced to maintain the thread of memory of 1931, challenging the most innovative and dynamic sectors of society to participate in the construction of a republican alternative that the founders of the II Republic they had taken care to build, thanks to making republicanism and progress synonymous through the ideals of a new society, freed from the corruption of the dynastic parties and the tutelage of the Catholic Church, to revive culture, free thought and social rights.
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In conclusion, fly above territorial prejudices (the recently published data of sympathy that we Catalans arouse throughout the State are alarming), promote the values of individual and collective responsibility, design the north of the conquest of all sovereignties ( also the one that has to allow the exercise of the right to self-determination) and act as a lever so that the generations born on horseback of the 20th and 21st centuries build solutions based on the socialization of decision-making and consent.
To make it possible, in short, for the progressive political and social currents of the State as a whole to face the crux of republicanism as a galvanizer of an essential regenerationism and why the San Sebastián Pact of 1930 has returned to the present day.