Javier Lambán is the peculiar president of Spain's Aragón region, a socialist who can't help talking about the Catalans every time he speaks, and for whom there wouldn't be enough prisons to lock up pro-independentists. He said on Saturday, as he was leaving PSOE Federal Committee meeting, that no regional president is to accept "to economically reward those who have been much more disloyal to the state". Lambán's is a curious way to address the political conflicts, placing money and loyalty at the center of the problem, since he is, like all of them, set to lose… dramatically.
The origin of the Catalan conflict was very much this: the disloyalty of the Spanish state with Catalonia and the breaching of the democratic transition agreements. But this immediately turned into 'Catalan state' and 'independence', once it was proved that there was no other possible option after so many years pulling out all the stops for Spain and assuming, on the one hand, the permanent breaches by the Spanish state with masochistic loyalty, and on the other hand, Catalonia's progressive loss of economic power due to the permanent financial oppression by Spain. From ten to fifteen billion euros of annual fiscal deficit leaves little room for Lambán to talk about disloyalties and economic rewards, no matter how shameless one can be.
He is not the only socialist regional leader to express the usual view that the privileges they have had against Catalonia are a normal thing. At the PSOE it never rains but it pours, since this was already done some time ago by the so-called "three tenors" - Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, Manuel Chaves and José Bono - whose heirs today are this Lambán and Castilla-La Mancha's Emiliano García-Page. And while they are stating their position, they are obstructing prime minister Pedro Sánchez's strategy, which is yet to be revealed, and which needs to be cleared up on whether it will include a dialogue table between the Catalan and the Spanish governments.
Politics is too often very predictable. So much so that very frequently it is not worth wasting a minute on statesman-like speculations if he has proved to be a permanent trickster.