Let us open!
Granada shakes on a glass floor. ICUs are collapsing in public hospitals because of COVID19. Health professionals resist. The Isabel Zendal hospital is becoming essential after the slum attacks from the left wing. GDP has fallen by 11 per cent since the uncivil war. Real unemployment is over 20 per cent; only 4 out of 10 young people have a job. 1.3 million families have no income. Food banks are out of stock. The Canary Islands are replacing tourism with hunger queues, illegal immigration is invading us, drug trafficking is growing in the Strait of Gibraltar and Galicia, squatters are legitimising their trampling of private property, the self-employed are going bankrupt, the countryside is collapsing and the miracle vaccines have not yet arrived. And, as if this were not enough, a government with imperial powers until May - 85 decree-laws - removes Health Minister Illa from his post so that he can "save Catalonia from constitutionalism".
All his gestures and words since he landed in Barcelona have been to vindicate pro-independence postulates, including that of " national health" which does not fit in with the unity and change he has just preached this weekend. Good riddance to bad rubbish. From a man who lies and never smiles, we should expect nothing. Nothing good. Salvador Illa has been a cardboard cut-out minister, with a face of reinforced concrete that has mimicked Sánchez and has fled with no explanation in Congress or apology for the worst health management in the whole of democracy. Let us hope that justice will soon speak.
More than 80,000 dead, not a word of encouragement to the families, and on top of that, insulting all groups: "I don't regret anything", he maintains. To his successor, Carolina Darías, he said: "You are going to enjoy this portfolio". And so much: 400 deaths a day and without seeing a coffin. Without praying to the dead, without comforting the living. Darias has followed his example and after the first inter-territorial council has decided not to change anything until 14-F, the day after the Catalan elections. By then, all health care dams in Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Castile and Leon, Extremadura, Rioja, the Basque Country and Andalusia will have burst.
Undoubtedly, the hardest hit groups have been the hotel and catering industries, which together support our main source of foreign currency: tourism. For a year now, Spain has been a desert. Although they have come out to protest in the streets and squares of all the provincial capitals, and some even went on pilgrimage from Santiago de Compostela to Madrid, no one has had more courage than Albert Raurich, who shook his metal shutter while desperately shouting: "Let us open! The owner of Los Palillos, with a Michelin medal, can't take it anymore. And he has broken off the election campaign to demand that, as the president of the Community of Madrid Isabel Díaz Ayuso has said in Barcelona: "closing trade and catering is ruin" while accusing the separatist mafia of robbing the Catalan people with 18 special taxes. "We maintain 3; the independentists and nationalists are the ones who have been robbing you since the 80s". Raurich's howl was no less than that of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who symbolises all the despair and loneliness of human beings.
Raurich's video went viral and paralysed the electoral campaign which, with the wind against it and the bad weather, was left to string together unimaginative slogans: The 1-0 coup perpetrators have asked for amnesty, knowing that with Ambassador Iceta in Castellana, 3 - the one of the 9 nations - the pardon is assured even with the report against the Supreme Court and the State Attorney General's Office. "We will do it again", the condemned politicians have reaffirmed, while JxCat party is threatening another coup d'état and will proclaim the Republic if the separatists reach 50 per cent of the votes. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has entered the campaign without denouncing the contempt of the Generalitat to the High Court for allowing the condemned politicias to campaign to break the Constitution, the Monarchy and our Nation. Puigdemont, the coward and fugitive, has not set foot on holy ground but has already agreed with ERC party to return to the Government, that is to say, to the teat of the State. The same, so that his wife, Marcela Topor, continues to receive more than 6,000 euros a month in 14 payments from the Barcelona Provincial Council, presided over by the socialist Nuria Marín, accused of corruption of public funds in the City Council of Hospitalet de Llobregat, where she is mayor for the PSC. Corruption is the glue that binds the separatists and the PSC.
Soon after Illa was allocated almost 35 MPs and promoted as the most voted party, the PSC candidate flatly rejected the unconditional votes of Inés Arrimadas. He continues to deny that he will not pact with the separatists - the same lie as Sánchez with Podemos and Bildu parties - in order to win a handful of votes from Ciudadanos party; but given the latest polls, Illa is looking for what Moncloa expects: to enter into a tripartite with ERC and En Común Podems. Pablo Iglesias has already suggested that "he will support a social Constitution for the Catalan Republic in the framework of the plurinational Spain". Perhaps it is the co-president's revenge because José Luis Escrivá, Minister for Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, has already taken to Brussels the extension of contribution times to obtain the maximum pension and the labour reform has been frozen. Simple reforms to start receiving European funds. The funds that the government will manage to be a "cut and paste" of Zapatero's Plan E in 2008 to cushion the crisis created by the real estate bubble. A lot of digitalisation and a lot of R+D+i that ended up in wider pavements and a huge public debt. And more unemployment. And more crisis. The most serious thing will be to see how the constitutionalist seats will fall short of 25 out of a total of 135. This is the black bill of the absence of the State in Catalonia.
Have you seen any national party demanding that the Generalitat return to the State the 70,000 million advanced by the Autonomic Liquidity Fund (FLA)? Amnesia is total in the constitutionalist parties. The PP has disembarked with Baroness Ayuso after her confrontation with Sánchez-Illa, and Pedro Casado has strolled along the Ramblas to continue whipping VOX and Ciudadanos. Inés Arrimadas "hugs" have been replaced by a simpler message. There are too many hugs and not enough votes. Santiago Abascal, after the support in Congress for the Executive, has felt the disenchantment of his sympathisers and has seen with pain how the vice-president Calvo did not even name his party by its acronym on "Thanksgiving Day" after the sudden abandonment of ERC party.
On Saturday they suffered attacks by the CUP in Gerona and had to be protected by the regional police. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo and Toni Cantó have condemned these attacks by the CUP. The rest remained in silence. A proof that there is no freedom to hold free elections in Catalonia, because "the separatists are nationalists rather than democrats". In fact, nationalists cannot be democrats because, like communists, they are blinded by hatred, fear and terror. Pure Nazism. Deep American Trumpism.
In fact, a detail to reflect the atmosphere in the four Catalan provinces: you can't move from one town to another except for work or extraordinary reasons in these times of Covid. But, look, you can break all the confinements to attend political rallies. This aberration has been allowed by the Electoral Board at the request of the Government of the Generalitat. Of course, as Dr. Sánchez has rightly argued in a serene and "equidistant" voice: "With Illa, the dark era of misgovernment will come to an end". You lied, Mr President, when you said in June that the curve had been broken, that the pandemic was over and that the time had come to enjoy and take to the streets. Before that, you also lied about the masks, about equipmenst and about experts; you lied to us about the purchase of equipment, you hid the cost of the purchases and the contracts with companies related to the PSOE and the PSC and you besieged Madrid to punish the PP when now, with three times the number of cases of infection, you are not allowing various socialist and popular communities to have the tools to overcome the Chinese virus. We go from 8-M to 14-F with a Caesarist mandate that prevents him from giving an account to the Parliament of the Nation. The only thing left to do is to bend the CGPJ because, as on Women's Day, "their lives depend on it".
Until May, when your absolute mandate expires, we are all hostages to your power. We have gone from citizens to servants without you and your government having lifted a finger to regenerate the institutions and create a ray of hope for so much accumulated poverty. On the contrary: after 14-F you will continue with your variable geometry to govern until 2030 relying on separatists and philo-terrorists because this Covid government -without sensitivity for the dead and their families- has only one purpose: to stay in power at any price. The only thing left for the government to do, as fellow Errejón is asking, is to decree a 4-day working day... to distribute the work. Will he apply this measure to the Executive and extend it to 40 ministries?
We have had a stolen year, a dark year. The darkest and blackest year of our lives. A year of mourning. That is why we applaud and make our own Albert Raurich's cry "Let us open up! Let us live! Let us return to democracy. These are difficult times and we need to clear the uncertainties, the fears and the coming hunger with the most powerful weapon: the truth. It is a matter of ethics, austerity, intelligence, honesty, humanity and courage. "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Nietzsche wrote. The weight of the first half of the last century taught us that the obsession with conformity leads directly to communism (1917) and fascism (1933). We are free and equal citizens. And Europeans: how many more deaths can a people endure in a state of alarm, riddled with silences and lies? We will continue to resist.
Antonio REGALADO runs BAHÍA DE ÍTACA at: aregaladorodriguez.blogspot.com