More than 40 days have gone by since Pedro Sánchez's cabinet approved the first decree for Spain's state of alarm on March 15th. The current extension does not expire until May 10th, but the Spanish government is already warning us that there will be a fifth, without ruling out that it will be the last to be requested in the Congress of Deputies. Prime minister Sánchez, in his television appearance on the 18th, uttered a phrase for the future that did not have the strength then that can now be intuited to it: in the future, there will be different states of alarm.
He did not go into much more detail, but it is clear that the formula of the single, centralized command of all the powers of the state which have any connection with the fight against coronavirus - and today, which powers are not connected to the pandemic? - has allowed him to annul Spain's state of autonomous communities with the stroke of a pen, and of course, to thus give reassurance to the deep state, which has always been against a decentralized model for running Spain. The regional presidents end up being grumpy types who, with greater or lesser success, give speeches in their own autonomous communities, although nothing they decide ends up taking effect, since the command centre is, in the case of Catalonia, 600 kilometres away.
The successive extensions of the state of alarm must cease to be what they have been so far: a blank cheque for the PSOE-Podemos government. The three Catalan pro-independence parties Republican Left, Together for Catalonia and the CUP must bring out into the open the deception and usurpation of autonomous community powers which the current situation implies. The same should be done by political groups which feel just as affected in the Basque Country, such as the PNV and Bildu, and in Galicia, the BNG, even though they are in opposition. It happened to the Basque Country's lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu when he hinted last Friday that the already-delayed Basque election might be held in July. A voice emanating from the Spanish government palace cut him short: there will be no election until the epidemic is under control.
Thus, over and over again, the state of alarm can be applied to everything; it immobilizes Torra in Catalonia and Urkullu in the Basque Country. They too will make their mistakes, of course, but right now, as everyone's mouths are full of praise for chancellor Merkel and even El País values her performance positively, it is appropriate to keep in mind that the mechanisms of the German federal system always tend to make Berlin reach agreements with the regional länder. Decentralization is not a phase but a permanent policy.
And the state of alarm decree goes in exactly the opposite direction.