In the society of obliviousness in which, unfortunately, our country often seems immersed, the older generations have begun to forget the importance of having figures like the former speaker of the Catalan Parliament and ex-minister of the Generalitat, Joan Rigol Roig. In fact, the new generations probably don't know who he was and what he did for Catalonia. Among the many things that can be highlighted about Rigol, who died this Tuesday in Barcelona at the age of 81, is that he was a great intermediary of consensus: even in those moments when his position was extremely fragile and the support he had was getting weaker, Rigol kept trying. That is probably why he also captivated his opponents, who always gave him the benefit of the doubt, a neutrality that, in public life, is very difficult to achieve.
Those who knew him best have over the last day highlighted a phrase that was certainly part of his set of Christian democratic ideas, based on a humanist, Catalanist and patriotic background: "A nation is a generational handover well done". From his leadership came initiatives such as the Cultural Pact, which he himself signed in 1985 as Catalan culture minister, while Raimon Obiols did so as first secretary of the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC). A pact that would not be without cost for someone who had just been appointed a minister in the government of Jordi Pujol; today it would be unthinkable for a party with an absolute majority - Convergència and Unió (CiU) had achieved a landslide at the ballot boxes with 72 deputies - to reach an agreement with the main party of the opposition, which had 41. Between the two political groups, they had 113 of the 135 parliamentarians and 77% of the votes. But Rigol was like that, incorruptible when it came to Catalan culture. His commitment to the culture and language had no limits, even if it ended up costing him his position a few months later.
When I met him, in 1980, setting up a Generalitat de Catalunya that was practically non-existent, lacking in powers and with little authority, he was in charge of the labour ministry. Catalonia had been hit by a storm of redundancies, with the industrial crisis that cost more than 20% of the 1.3 million jobs lost in Spain in those first five years of the eighties. That is, a little more than 263,000 jobs. The unemployment rate had risen from 8.9% in 1979 to 22.8% in 1985. Rigol was learning the ropes as a politician, but he sat employers and unions at his table, and his obsession was to coordinate the efforts of the administrations to reduce the impact of the crisis on the unemployed and their families. This attitude was not unusual, especially coming from someone who had, in the second half of the sixties, been a chaplain in a working-class neighborhood - in the Montserrat parish located in the Barcelona's Guinardó district - and a facilitator of meetings of unions and clandestine left-wing parties, held in church premises. Rigol left the priesthood in the second half of that decade, but he always kept that outlook of "people matter most".
Rigol's commitment to Catalan culture and language was incorruptible, with a commitment that knew no bounds, even if it ended up costing him his position
With the stubborn attitude of not giving up any battle as a lost cause, he pushed forward the National Pact for the Right to Decide, which was constituted in 2013 and had the endorsement of 800 organizations and a wide range of political parties from CiU, to the CUP through the Republican Left and Initiative for Catalonia. In total, 87 seats in Parliament, which was an extremely generous absolute majority. That national pact was not at all easy and anyone else would have thrown in the towel. Rigol found strength and undoubtedly remembered his mentor at Unió, Miquel Coll i Alentorn, probably the only politician of the Spanish Transition who, even by his party colleagues or Jordi Pujol himself, was addressed as "Senyor Coll." Coll and Alentorn used to say to the party members in those training sessions that used to be held: "When they tell you that there's nothing to be done, get to work, which means that there is everything to be done."
It was certainly a Catalonia in which politics had an important role in the country's leadership. Many politicians also had a significant education background and, obviously, a culture and knowledge of the country that was light years ahead of what exists currently. In those years, making a fool of oneself due to ignorance of Catalonia was not allowed. It was unthinkable that the head of a list - such as that of the Comuns in Lleida, Elena Farré - would go so far as to state in a television interview that she did not know how many counties her constituency had, who the president of the Generalitat was between 1934 and 1940 or to confuse Lleida with Cervera as the university created by Felipe V.
When it came to dignifying politics, Rigol set a good example. One day, when he was deputy speaker of the Senate, I met him in Madrid at a reception for a foreign official. José María Aznar was the Spanish prime minister and the Catalan politician had proposed a constitutional reform to transform the Senate into a chamber of Spain's Autonomous Communities. Aznar, who had just arrived in power, had given him positive signs and Rigol believed that it would go ahead. Obviously, it did not. After the operation failed, he was probably the first person to verbalize to me the rampant Lerrouxism that he saw coming from the Spanish right. He said that with concern and predicted dark days for Catalonia. His diagnosis was accurate. We discussed it again a few times and it always ended the same: "When we can, we will have to make an effort to get the right back to normal". Rest in peace.