Massimo d’Alemaduring a debate after the fall of the first Prodi Government, back in the second half of the 1990s, declared that in his party of formation -the mythical Italian Communist Party-, he had been taught that there was a left serving -which is concerned with the real problems of working people, assuming contradictions and costs- and one that remains in the estheticit acts narratively, but it is absolutely useless.
In the vicissitude of the conversion of the labor reform decree, Esquerra Republicana has played to pretend that it was making useless of the left, thinking that the reform would also be approved. He has played to make see, he has not done either. Because, on this occasion, the squinting dynamic to which the Republicans have accustomed us –in Barcelona, heirs of Pujolismo, in Madrid, disciples of Lenin-, remains, this time, more unlikely than ever. The suspicions and/or the negative vote of Bildu They can be considered a political error or a success depending on how you look at it, but they have an explanation. in Euskadi, the LAB and ELA unions -who are against the reform- they are majorityand the nationalist left understands –wrongly or not– that it has to take this into account.
Bildu has long since decided to play state politics, but his field of action continues to be Euskadi and part of the conviction that adopting a position contrary to the majority workers’ organizations in his territory of reference could harm him. The situation is very different in Catalonia: the National Workers’ Commission of Catalonia, headed by Javier Pacheco, and the UGT of Catalonia, also headed by Camil Ros (notoriously close to the Republicans), they have been the great supporters of the agreement and the text of the decree presented by the Ministry of Labor of Yolanda Díaz. In the last trade union elections in Catalonia, according to data from Idescat, the sum of the representatives of Commissions and the UGT in Catalonia exceeds 80%.
Technically, then, the option of overthrowing the reform by the Esquerra Repúblicana has clearly gone against the enormous majority position expressed by working people in Catalonia, through their representative organizations. As long as, as the deputy for Junts, Míriam Nogueras, has released in a moment of blood-curdling sincerity, these trade union organizations are not considered Catalan, and therefore the opinion of the people who are active and the people who run them. But here you enter the unknown dimension of ‘völkisch’ essentialism that any democrat has to worry about, and from which a part of Catalan independence and nationalism hides less and less.
Discarded therefore the hypothesis that the ERC’s vote against the labor reform is based on a more ambitious position from the left -even if it was for an aesthetic impulse-, The hypotheses around the reasons that explain this position remain open.. As always, they seem to be more than one.
Related news
The first is typical of ‘procedural’ fiction: the constant need to sell, before the pro-independence electorate, the distance from the central government. The second is the will stain and hit the rising leadership of Yolanda Díazwhich they perceive as a threat because, at least in part, the space of the ‘comuns’ and United We Can, especially in general ones, is border with some fringes of the ERC electorate. The last reason is more substantive: as Enric Juliana has pointed out, Esquerra wants to seduce small Catalan businessmen, for whom the abuse of temporality has gone very well, and who, together with officials from the Generalitat (the only sector where the Intersindical, the nationalist central also opposed to the reform, has significant representation), They are the nerve of the bases of independence.
It is difficult to know if the Republicans’ decision will be favorable to their interests. Surely, for the time being, it has made it clear that the smoke screen – this is smoke – of wanting to present their vote against it as a pure and left-wing option has not been enough to cover the face of real fear of Gabriel Rufian in Congress, when it seemed that the reform would run aground. The living portrait of frivolity.