It can only be the result of the intense summer heat this year, some places recording their highest temperatures ever, that the Spanish prime minister should say the following in the Marivent palace: "Felipe VI has always built bridges with Catalonia". It was after a relaxed lunch between the two couples and the corresponding photo opportunity which is going to fill the newspapers' front pages and the TV bulletins and, according to the weather, with an apparent temperature of 47ºC (117ºF).
Although, thinking on it, maybe it's not just the heat, since Pedro Sánchez, last week, at the end of his last cabinet meeting gave us another sentence to analyse: Juan Carlos's reign was exemplary. It's easy to think that the word's usage has eroded its meaning, because if we turn to the dictionary that's not what it means. Princess Corinna's revelations don't allow us to speak with certainty of an exemplary reign, something which, furthermore, his hasty abdication already allow us to suspect. His son must think the same, keeping him away from Palma and the Marivent to not run into each other in the middle of the scandal over the Spanish monarchy's honour.
More striking, however, is that he should say that the king has always built bridges with Catalonia, since rather what he's done has been to knock them down. The last two speakers of the Catalan Parliament -Carme Forcadell and Roger Torrent- haven't been received at the Zarzuela palace to inform him of the election of the corresponding Catalan presidents. That would be building bridges to avoid the political and social disconnection which has happened in Catalonia with the Spanish monarchy.
And his speech on 3rd October, after the police violence of 1st October, exactly what bridges did that build? They will be, in any case, bridges to leave Spain. But I'm rather afraid those weren't the bridges Sánchez was referring to.