The other day an acquaintance of mine surprised me, who in her youth was on the left, and later voted for the PSOE or the PP. She told me: “I am thinking of voting for whoever announces that he wants to eliminate the autonomies and whether he is from the right or very right, because the left does not assure me.” To which I replied: “Did I hear you correctly? Who has seen you and who sees you!” Thus ended the chance encounter.
And it is that in Spain new Jacobins are sprouting. The Jacobins were members of a political group that in the French Revolution wanted a strong and centralized state against local or regional powers that they considered more prone to caciquismo and, therefore, to the real loss of freedoms. A real danger of which there are obvious examples.
But along with this defense of individual freedom, the Jacobins developed procedures that led them to excesses. Their desire for control led them to use terror. History personifies him in the period of command of Robespierre, later arrested and guillotined on charges of abuse of power in the summer of 1794. Later Fouché, Minister of Police of the Republic, who had been a Jacobin, ordered the closure of the grouping.
That is why the supporter of a centralized State is usually called a Jacobin in which all political and administrative activity is directed from the nation’s capital. This is what my friend, a convinced democrat and constitutionalist and an unexpected anti-autonomist, wanted. Why this turn? There were always voters against Chapter VIII of the Constitution. But they did not exceed a small percentage. But now there are new supporters of eliminating the Autonomies from the 1978 Constitution; developed since then.
Its growth is recent. They did not increase even during the ETA terrorism; They have done it in recent years as a reaction to the Procés. The attempt to break the law to achieve a secession of the beloved Catalonia has alerted many Spaniards.
The constitutional disloyalty of the independentistas scared them. The use of education to broaden their social bases and the intention to tear the nation apart sooner or later terrifies them. But the number of the new Jacobins has also increased, their conviction that the constitutionalists are not capable of really stopping the Procés, which, although diminished, is still alive and straining.
That is why the Jacobins increase. A set of votes that are looking for something impossible at this time and whose attempt would lead to a new confrontation between Spaniards. Pro-independence and constitutionalists would do well to resolve the conflict before the new Jacobinism ends up consolidating itself in the hands of a centralist populism and can stand up to them with more force.
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