Prophets and leaders

It will be years before Pujol’s political legacy of building Catalonia’s self-government can be separated from his patrimonial exercise of power

Esther Vera
4 min
Profetes i líders

“The prophets must be stoned; that is their lot and the test of their self-fulfillment. But a leader who is stoned may merely prove that he has failed in his function through deficiency of wisdom, or through confusing his function with that of a prophet".

I came across this sentence in The Strategy of Indirect Approach, by Sir Basil Liddel Hart, a book on military strategy that is, in reality, a treatise on politics. This in the same week when former president Jordi Pujol returned to hell. Police conducted a new search of his Barcelona flat, his office and his house in Queralbs, where he forged the mystique of nation building during decades. On leaving home, he made yet another act of contrition: "I'm sorry for everything that's happening". And according to reporters on site, during the search Pujol murmured: "Everything is falling apart". In recent years he has been something of a recluse, talking with politicians and journalists, expiating his sins of commission or omission, seeking some way to separate his political legacy from the judicial affair that has hit his entire family.

But it will be years before Pujol’s political legacy of building Catalonia’s self-government can be separated from his patrimonial exercise of power, his family’s and his own abuse of his position, their systematic corruption entwined with moral lessons in what it takes to be an exemplary Catalan. The connivance of the elites in Catalonia and Spain --those who didn't probe, who picked prosecutors, who didn't publish any stories about the Banca Catalana fiasco, who mingled at weddings, in the words of Pujol himself-- is over; and the conflict is bloody.

The swindle was not only of the people who paid for illegal commissions on public works that now sit in some tax haven or in the account of some front man, but also of those who believed Jordi Pujol’s prophetic dimension. They should keep their feet on the ground and not get carried away listening to the arrogance of his son, who thought he was the smartest of all, but now comes across as a humorless fool. Now is the time for the vindication of those honest souls that were cast aside from the king’s court when they confronted the almighty son; now is the time to ascertain not only the origin of the cash, but also the methods for multiplying it and whether or not we can assume that the flow of kickbacks has been staunched. If the multiplication had only been for the enrichment of Pujol Jr, or if the racket continued in CDC (Pujol’s old party), via the Palau de la Música, and when and where the 3% kickbacks ended.

In the same book I found another statement that made me think. Napoleon said that, in war, "the moral is to the physical as three to one". The Pujol case and the tightening of the noose on Jordi Pujol’s wife will not be discounted from the collective moral, provided that the justice system maintains its pressure on the couple and loose ends are chased up. The credibility of the political firewall provided by CDC’s demise will depend on the actions of the new PDECat leadership and, above all, on the results of the probe into the Millet and the 3% cases. The transparency that is being demanded of Rajoy's corrupt PP must also be demanded at home, in Catalonia.

In looking back at recent years, there is a component of collective fear that has no place in a healthy democracy. Fear of straying from what is expected, careerism, fear of publishing stories that are uncomfortable to the powers that be, and fear of negotiation. The Catalan oasis was a mirage and there will always be others for us to expose.

Corruption.es. The new week of Pujol's expiation coincides —is it a coincidence?— with the emergence of the political sewage in Madrid’s regional government. And Rajoy has taken advantage of it to make a state visit and, later, to reach an agreement with the Basque Nationalist Party --ever so pragmatic-- to move his budget forward. It appears to be a calculated explosion to end corruption in the Madrid region, after similar scandals detonated in the Balearic Islands, Valencia, and Murcia. A widespread method of using the public system for personal and political gain. Following Aznar’s second term, Rajoy took over the PP beating Rato and Esperanza Aguirre. Both of the latter have been toppled and the Spanish president is unopposed. Podemos is lost in political posturing, Ciutadanos is sitting comfortably in the shadows of the right, and the PSOE is also heading for its own implosion, unmoved despite being affected by Andalusia’s ERO corruption case.

Without an alternative to the PP government, the system of checks and balances of a solid democracy cannot be fully guaranteed. We will have to continue with a low-quality system in which the bodies of Franco-era ministers receive tributes on the shoulders of democratic Ministers, accompanied by fascist cries. On the shoulders of a Justice Minister who tried to catapult himself politically with a reform of Spain’s abortion law that proved excessive, even for his own party.

Spain’s economic data --growth and confidence-- are positive, despite the putrefaction of the PP’s corruption in Spain, the EROs in Andalusia and the Pujol case in Catalonia. Catalonia has a shared project to prevent not the Italianization, but rather the Argentina-ization that Spain is experiencing. The first thing that we must watch for, if we want to vote and win, is that our leaders do not become prophets.

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