Another Fine Mas: After the election

You will recall that photo of President Obama, Hillary Clinton and various other voyeurs in the White House "situation room" watching the last moments of Osama bin Laden. It wasn't quite the same, in that no one actually got topped, but there was a similar gathering of Balearics politico voyeurs to watch the last moments of Artur Mas's political suicide attempt in Catalonia at the weekend. There, in their midst, was Jolly Joe Bauzà in a PP "situation room". Mission accomplished, they would have thought.

Would they have been right to have thought this? A combination of media slur and central government PP insinuations had undermined Mas. Which is what they would have hoped, though whether the accusations about Mas, kickbacks and Swiss bank accounts really had anything to do with the Catalonia election result is very debatable.

Bauzà rejoiced in good Thatcher-recapture-of-South-Georgia style. The Catalonian people have rejected independence, he rejoiced, failing entirely to appreciate that the Catalonian people hadn't rejected independence. What they had done was to suggest that they might quite like independence at some future date but that they didn't necessarily want Artur leading the charge.

No one foresaw what happened at the polling stations on Sunday. It had been forecast Mas's CiU wouldn't get an absolute majority but it had not been forecast that the CiU would lose seats. Or in quite the number that it did. Twelve fewer than it had before the election, Artur and the CiU are in a real pickle.

Mas has said that he will not resign but he should resign. He made a colossal error of judgement. He took the huge pro-independence rally in Barcelona in September as the indication that he could call an election and get a ringing endorsement from all this pro-independence sentiment that would enable him to set the independence ball rolling. His error was in believing that this pro-independence sentiment wanted him to be the ball roller.

What was being overlooked in the run-up to the Catalonia election was the fact that it was an election, not a vote on independence. Granted, independence and a mandate to press for it were the reasons for calling the election, but elections are rarely only concerned with one issue. Artur knew full well that his austerity measures, ones which, in conditions of normal political harmony, would have Mariano Rajoy voicing support for the Catalonians, were not playing terribly well with the Catalan citizenship. The independence gambit was, therefore, his way of seeking to regain popular support. Or so he must have thought. This was his error, however. He, too, forgot that elections are about more than one issue. Or that elections are often about one other issue - it's the economy, stupid. The CiU took an unexpected beating at the polls which should in fact have been expected. Mas committed suicide because he overlooked the small matters of the economy and his austerity measures.

Now he finds himself having to form a coalition with very unlikely bedfellows. There are two main options - the ERC (the Catalan Republican Left) or the PSC (the Catalonian version of the PSOE socialists). The ERC are fervent independentists. The PSC aren't. Like PSOE nationally, they don't approve of separatism. For the right-leaning, conservative Catholic CiU neither option is particularly attractive. Where the economy is concerned, the PSC would probably make greater sense as a coalition partner, but if this is the option Mas were to follow, the independence issue would be dead and buried (for now), thus provoking the obvious question as to why Mas ever bothered raising it.

But the independence issue will not go away. Bauzà is completely wrong in his analysis because not only have the ERC gained significantly, a party that had never previously had parliamentary representation, the anti-capitalist CUP, now has three seats. Mas may have been right about the sentiment for independence, but he most certainly hadn't bargained on the electorate actually voting for parties for whom independence is pretty much their only reason for being.

The belief is that Mas will press ahead towards a referendum with the ERC by his side. If anything, the election will cause a greater entrenching of views. There was just a possibility that Rajoy might have responded by revisiting the Catalonian request for tax-raising powers (the rejection of which kicked off the momentum towards independence), but one feels that this is now impossible. While pro-Spanish unity politicians like the Balearics president might think that mission was accomplished on Sunday, he is very wrong. It was a botched job and one that has made the situation potentially more volatile than it was.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.