Among the Catalans who have made anti-Catalanism into their political modus vivendi, it is probably Albert Rivera who, despite competition from Inés Arrimadas, leads the field. There is no symbol of Catalan identity which the Ciudadanos (Cs) leader does not want to do away with, from the language to the culture, from public broadcaster TV3 to the Mossos d'Esquadra police. There is a certain merit in going to Seville for an election meeting and, down in Andalusia, winning headlines for threatening the director of Catalonia's TV3, Vicent Sanchis. Ciudadanos were born for this mission: destroying Catalan self-government, imposing monolingualism, eliminating the Catalan education system and recentralizing power as much as possible.
In fact, the TV3 headline was what Rivera was after, since from his speech at the Andalusian meeting, Rivera tapped off one single tweet that reads as follows: "The director of TV3 laid a complaint against me for telling the truth. And a few days later he's been charged with taking part in the 1st October coup. I'll tell you something, Mr Sanchis: look for a good lawyer because, unlike [Pedro] Sánchez, I won't give you a pardon."
In recent days, Ciudadanos have been propagating a lie which they don't know how to get out of, which arose when, either spontaneously or deliberately, Rivera declared that TV3 had called Inés Arrimadas puta - a whore. The public broadcaster immediately demanded that he withdraw this claim and, when he refused, Sanchis laid a complaint against the Cs leader. Now, Rivera is threatening Sanchis with a tweet that contains three new lies: the director of TV3 didn't make a complaint against him for telling the truth, but rather for lying; for Sanchis to need a pardon, he would have to be pronounced as guilty, which hasn't happened; and nor has Pedro Sánchez said that he would gave a hypothetical pardon should he be returned as leader of the Spanish government and the journalist be found guilty.
But none of that matters. For years Cs have been used to trading in lies. Their approach to politics drags down Spanish democracy, and former French prime minister Manuel Valls has now begun to wake up to this, after happily signing up as their Barcelona candidate in the municipal elections and now finding his mayoral bid is not achieving lift-off. Now, injecting threats against a TV network and a journalist into the general election campaign might yield votes, in the same way as Donald Trump reaped the spoils of his fight with the television network CNN in the last US presidential election. Trading in lies, you sometimes turn a profit, but the bankruptcy of your democracy becomes evident, sooner or later.