The Constitution is turning years and nobody heeds the many warnings of the jurists on the need for its reform. It is obvious that the political circumstances do not exist to reach the parliamentary consensus required to approve it, nor about the meaning of the changes to be introduced. Obviousness cannot hide the fact that Title VIII that gives life to the Autonomous State is a victim of its conception, to the point of endanger the very viability of the state itself, according to the premonitory report on Spain by Santiago Muñoz Alonso. After this prestigious alarm signal, the ‘procés’ stressed the constitutional model to the limit, as warned by the 2017 report on democracy in Spain by the Fundación Alternativa.
Title VIII was hastily thought from the short republican experience, leaving the model open and, therefore, susceptible to the political pressure of each situation, also renouncing to establish not only the number and names of the communities and forgetting, even, give a role to the autonomous governments in the eventual constitutional reform of the Autonomous State. This is not the only challenge of the current text, the protection of some social rights and the rebirth of republican sentiment on the merits of the Royal House itself are awaiting a response. The point is that the complex process of change it is going to be reflected and planned or imposed by force of events, that is, improvised.
Right now, the most determining factor could be constitutional and institutional stress created by the Catalan independence movement. Facing a reform based on the demands of the independence movement, if only for the acceptance of its language, could be a mistake. The Constitution of a United State it is hardly going to open the doors to its disintegration. In the best of cases, to respond to the undeniable plurality of Spain, the political forces that have the drive for reform in their hands could opt for the federal State. But it turns out that the federation is considered in most manuals the ideal formula for guaranteeing the federated states the unity of the whole. For the independence movement, then, this route does not suppose any progress, on the contrary, it strengthens the idea of a Spain respectful of its history and its reality.
From this perspective, the probabilities that the negotiating table between the central government and the Generalitat end up being a new element of frustration are high. The dialogue has unquestionably lowered the tension, but since the two parties did not publicly accept the real margin of the agreements, however notable these are going to be in the autonomic logic, This confusion (accepted and sought) could lead to a new crisis.
Related news
The reaction of sovereignty is very predictable: “Come, dialogue will not bring us independence, Let’s go back to one-sidedness & rdquor ;. But supposing that a constitutional reform proposal came from the table to advance the national recognition of Catalonia and of all the pluralities of the nation of nations, it is not too risky to venture that this reform would be born dead, because automatically the right, essential to approve it, would reject it for interpreting it as “an assignment to the enemies of Spain”.
The responsibility of the Government of Pedro Sánchez will prevent it, it must be assumed, from burning a reform for the future in a negotiation with some interlocutors whose project is to ignore the rest of the State, whatever its constitutional order. A legitimate aspiration that they settle on a supposed and unappealable social majority. A myth denied by various authors, one of them, José Rico in this newspaper; forgetting also that, to date, nothing has surpassed the support obtained by the Constitution in Catalonia: 2,701,870 votes. A majority not exceeded, despite the population increase registered, by neither of the two referendums of the statutes, nor by any of the consultations tolerated or prohibited and absurdly repressed, nor by no plebiscite election. It has been 43 years since this, a long time, of course, but much closer than 1714.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com