I've listened this Wednesday to the Spanish prime minister during his different speeches in the Congress in the debate on Catalonia and I have to admit it was everything but a surprise. Six months after the motion of no-confidence which took him to the Moncloa government palace thanks to independence supporters, or rather their votes, Sánchez took to the podium and did a Rajoy: no proposal for Catalonia and various warnings and threats towards Catalans.
The round of imaginary dialogue has ended abruptly: without starting. In that, Madrid is full of experts. Soraya goes as deputy PM and Calvo arrives, the actors change but the argument doesn't. Nor does the outcome. The time is here when all those moderates, and independence supporters too, who believed that Sánchez wouldn't be Rajoy and that foreign minister Borrell was just an anecdote are starting to get downcast. Might it not be Sánchez that is the anecdote?
Madrid, the state, doesn't want to negotiate anything. It wants its wishes to be fulfilled and that's it. And the independence movement will have to decide if it accepts these rules for the game. Above all Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra, who have tried to dodge the problem only to find it suddenly right in front of them. And it's not Torra who promoted it (he's not so important) but Andalusia which, caught up in the unity of Spain, has filled the official offices of the political powers in Madrid with panic.
And the most striking thing is that whilst the state makes threats, it's incapable of keeping the Princess of Girona awards in that city and is moving them to Barcelona, and that the cabinet meeting on 21st December, far from being held in some official state building, like that of the central government's delegation to Catalonia, has ended up in premises for hire for different conventions, meetings and banquets. What other state would do that?
A cabinet meeting which today seems to form part of an apparatus which only offers two options: either the people who want to protest renounce doing so or the seven plagues in the form of article 155 or something similar will fall upon the Catalan government and institutions. It's not strange that, in this climate, that taxi drivers in Madrid should listen to Cope, Onda Cero and Jiménez Losantos whilst a significant minority, but still a minority, should predict, frightened, that the Spanish error of 1st and 3rd October last year might happen again. Only man trips twice over the same stone.