A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the times when, as those of us of a certain age remember, teachers used to ask their classes how many provinces there were in Spain. Between the late 1950s and the early 60s, the total increased, thanks to the four (colonial) African provinces: Ifni; Fernando Poo and Río Muni - so-called Spanish Guinea - and the Sahara. And then the number was reduced: the second and third of these became independent in 1968 as the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Ifni was surrendered to Morocco in 1969 and finally the Sahara was abandoned in 1975, leading to the current total of 50. The creation of the Spanish provinces goes back to the territorial division of 1833 devised by Javier de Burgos. Hence, today, there are places where their mention appears obsolete, and one of those places is Catalonia, since they are reminiscent of the past, of an old centralism, and of the attempts that were made to consecrate these administrative districts in order to dispute the role that corresponds to the autonomous communities.
In fact, although it is true that provinces still serve as the units for elections, their political importance has steadily fallen and even administratively they have lost weight - on many occasions, their reason to exist, with the exception of those in the Basque Country. So given all that, the fact that it was a minister of the PSOE and, to add insult to injury, a Catalan one, Salvador Illa, organizational secretary of the Catalan Socialists (PSC), who announced that the territorial unit of preference to be used for the de-escalation process of the coronavirus lockdown will be the province is not just one more of these everyday incidents that are taking place in the Spanish government's Moncloa palace. There have already been several messages issued by the Catalan Socialists along the same lines which do nothing but chisel ever more deeply a mental framework that serves to erase the Spain of the autonomous regions and move towards a de facto recentralization of all the political power which is not already dependent on Madrid.
Last week, the PSC's deputy spokesperson in the Catalan parliament, Eva Granados, used Spanish in her speech and told her fellow MPs that she would not allow it to be treated as a foreign language. The fact was surprising because the Socialists usually make their speeches in Catalan and this has been the case since the inauguration of the Parliament in 1980 as a result of an agreement at the time to promote the language in inferior conditions, which is, however you look at it, Catalan. It was the accord on political Catalanism of the time and it is beginning to offer signs of fracture.
The provinces; the use of Spanish; the single command usurping powers in the autonomous communities under a markedly unconstitutional state of alarm which, after so many extensions, only seems to have one goal; the "We'll stop this virus together" publicity campaign; forty-five days of the men in uniform offering their daily reports on highs, lows and incidents from the Moncloa; and the Spanish government's monolithic vision of the Moncloa pacts of 1977 which were, politically speaking, a taste of what would in 1981 be contained in the LOAPA, the law controlling the creation of the autonomies: all of this is beginning to give tangible form to a body of recentralizing doctrine from the current government which is far too large. People can look the other way, of course. But it is becoming harder and harder to deny the evidence.