2024-12-16 19:45:00
Barcelona“They will tell me that I am nostalgic for consensus. I am, I have been and it seems that I will continue to be. There is no point in disguising it.” Towards the end of his lecture, lawyer and former politician Miquel Roca makes this confession in front of an audience that is about to burst into applause. We have just participated in the second edition of the Jaume Vicens Vives Conference, with which the Cercle d’Economia recalls that legendary meeting of 1958 in which the historian and theorist of Catalanism spoke of the “captains of industry” and, in some way, meant the genesis of the Circle itself. And if last year the physicist Lluís Torner designed the Catalonia of the future, this year he wanted to reclaim a certain way of doing politics and understanding democracy in the figure of one of the fathers of the Constitution.
As happened a few days ago with Angela Merkel, in the front row there were Jordi Pujol and also other characters of that two-front Convergència (pujolists and rockists) such as Xavier Trias or Lluís Recoder. Few active politicians, if any Jaume Giró (Junts) or Antoni Balmón (PSC) together with former president José Montilla.
Roca’s thesis is that, despite the radical changes that have transformed the country since 1958, the problems cited by Vicens Vives are essentially the same: preservation of identity, need for leadership, adaptation to economic changes and fight against inequalities. In reality, Roca describes the Convergència program of Christian-social inspiration in which he fought and which today, once disappeared, survives as a spirit and a way of doing things that does not find a comfortable place in any of the current parties.
Single financing
“Catalonia is a fact of freedom”, he proclaims, underlining the need for respect for difference, for pact and for the will to come to an agreement to respond to a plural and different reality. And here he issues a warning to the (independence) navigators: “Yes to more self-government, yes to more funding, yes to more respect for Catalonia, but a legitimate ambition can never punish the well-being of the people.” The idea is clear: ideas can never be defended if this is harmful to the economy. Roca’s defense of the single financing for Catalonia is the only suggestion that directly connects his speech with current events. “It is necessary to defend the uniqueness of the financing, which is fully constitutional, because everyone has the right to their own uniqueness.” Here Roca exhibits the Murrian pragmatism of the man who was at the origin of “coffee for all” and defends that bilateralism should be combined with multilateralism.
We cannot impose what the citizens have rejected.”
The second point that refers to the present day is when Roca recalls the figure of Isaac Andik and places him as an example of entrepreneurial leadership. “Nothing justifies indifference and even less contempt” towards the public, he maintains, even for doing the “thankless task of going against the grain”.
When it comes to recipes, Roca does not deviate from the script: he asks to avoid polarization and all or nothing, “which very often ends in nothing” and is very critical of populism, which he clearly identifies with anti-immigration and which he considers a danger to social coexistence. It also recommends institutional respect and ends with a final warning to those who might be tempted to capitalize on the concept of Catalonia starting from maximalist positions: “In a democracy each force represents those who voted for it, no one else. This cannot be imposed that the citizens have rejected”. There is therefore only one path to progress and that, in Roca’s mouth, is a word made flesh and personified: pact.
#lessons #nostalgic #consensus