The Catalan parties are about to once again postpone the approval of their own electoral law. A Parliament that pretends to be a champion of self-government and that has even had majorities in favor of “disconnecting” from Spain is incapable of approving a basic rule of any democratic regime, the one that regulates how the representation of citizens is substantiated based on the territories in which they live, the one that determines how sovereignty is organized, the one that establishes conditions of equity in the right to political participation, the one that makes up the minimum democratic quality. During these 41 years Have you all looked more at the partisan interest calculator than the disaffection indexes of the citizens. Having a regulation based on purely partisan interests does nothing but deepen the distrust in institutions and widen the gap between citizens and the political class. A gap that is now also generational, with voters who have reached adulthood seeing that they followed absurd rules such as the prohibition of publishing polls the last week of the campaign or the disastrous conditions of voting by mail in the digital era. Catalonia must have an electoral law, first of all, for a minimum democratic guarantee of its institutions and for the recovery of citizen trust.
The main difficulty posed by the parties to avoid this debate is the fear of some formations, now pro-independence, of losing the possibility of having parliamentary majorities if the weight of the territories in the election of deputies is rebalanced. It is true that the current system was devised by the UCD government to prevent the victory of the PSUC, of the “communists” they said in those days. Throughout Spain, and also in Catalonia, the urban vote depreciated. And it has continued like this in both political spaces. Throughout these years, different alternatives have been put on the table to reduce this differential without actually eliminating it, since the territories are also important. But there has been no way.
We are in a position to demand that this time not be the case. Some leaders of the independence movement should now remember what they wrote or what they said when they were leaders of civil society and from the Fundació Jaume Bofill, for example, or from the ANC, they defended that principle of a man, a vote. There is no pro-independence project that can be taken seriously if it is incapable of even proposing an electoral law that deepens self-government instead of take advantage of the worst face of the autonomism of the Transition. The parties that wish to change the sovereignist agenda also have the challenge of making an inclusive electoral law proposal that forces them to take into account the territorial dimension and that reconciles them with a minority electorate but that also has to be part of the Catalan project.
Last September, this eternal issue was reopened by ERC and now it has been the PSC that has signed up to the idea with the intention of drafting the law within six months. Skepticism, however, is general, because the pro-independence parties are likely to block any solution that increases proportionality, relying on the need to have a two-thirds majority, which they sovereignly ignored in the fateful debate on September 6 and 7, 2017. And the The suspicion is that the non-independence parties will take advantage of this refusal to make themselves look good without fixing the problem. That is the worst solution imaginable.