Many, many years ago, I bumped into the late Catalan politician Ramon Trias Fargas during the inauguration of one of the party congresses of Democratic Convergence of Catalonia. Trias Fargas, as president of the party, had just given the opening speech and had placed on the table the debate about an economic concert for Catalonia - a special agreement on its economic relationship with Spain. The issue had not, up till then, been on the political agenda and would occupy all the newspaper headlines the following day. Everybody congratulated Trais Fargas and was very satisfied with his discourse. When I asked him the reason for the vehemence of his words he was very honest, making a comparison with the two best-known Catalan political figures of the day: "Look, when Jordi Pujol speaks, he's bound to get television coverage whatever he says; with Miquel Roca, a similar thing happens and he will always end up appearing in La Vanguardia. For me it's a little more difficult, so I need to be stronger, more radical, if you know what I mean".
Reading the nonsense that is often uttered during election campaigns, I am sure that the reader will already know what I mean. But sometimes, among such declarations, there are those that are not exaggeration but are simply idiocy. Such a statement has just been made by the leader of the Catalan branch of the Popular Party and candidate to be president of Catalonia, Xavier García Albiol, who has proposed "to close TV3 and to open it again with normal people". It is not the first time that the PP or Citizens party have raised the possibility of closing TV3 - the Catalan public broadcasting network - and to be fair, it would probably have been Albert Rivera (Citizens) who was the first. What nobody has proposed before, and this is Albiol's innovation, is that once closed, it should be reopened with normal people. What are normal people for Albiol? I have a certain idea about what he means and, to say it politely, he must be thinking of those journalists who applaud the implementation of article 55 or who say that on 1st October there was no police violence in Catalonia. Basically, those that want a 'normalized' television channel and have Spanish public television, TVE, as their reference point.
Former Spanish deputy PM Alfonso Guerra said this Saturday that he could not understand why there had been no direct political intervention in TV3 under the provisions of article 155 and, with his usual stridency, he pointed the finger at the Spanish and Catalan socialist parties, the PSOE and PSC. Simply put, they did not do it because it would have been a total and utter political and journalistic scandal, although even so, the hand of the Spanish government can be sensed, or so it seems, at certain moments on the Catalan public network. From the station's very beginnings, its test broadcasts in 1983, TV3 has been the state structure - this term was not used back then - which, for successive governments of Spain, had to be disarmed. Some by more diplomatic means and others using coarser methods.
Although its total audience varies between 11% and 13% and the rest of the television spectrum is almost entirely dominated by Spanish-wide networks, the problem for the pro-155 parties continues to be TV3. Tie the hands of TV3. Eliminate TV3. Denigrate TV3. And believe that it is the Catalan public television chain which is responsible for Catalonia's inability to understand what Spanish deputy PM Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría said with such aplomb in a speech on Friday: that the suppression of Catalan autonomy, the imposition of article 155 and the expulsion of the Catalan government as carried out by the Spanish Government constituted a show of respect to Catalans. In the end, everything is much simpler that that, and many Catalans are no longer willing to believe that it is best to continue being governed from Madrid - as if Catalonia were just the sum of four provinces, rather than a country that has decided to continue on course towards its own freedom.