The motion passed in the City Council of León to claim the independence of Castile and the constitution of a new autonomy from Leon is far from being anecdotal news. Rather, it is an obvious symptom - another one - of the process of identity centrifugation in Spain today. A process reminiscent of the cantonalism that caused the wreck of the First Republic in the 19th century and that conspires today against the collective project of freedom and equality in a single diverse but indivisible nation enshrined in the 1978 Constitution.

The demagogic strategy of territorial tort and supposed historical rights extends as an epidemic. During these years, that strategy has served Basque and Catalan nationalisms to blackmail - with sad success - the State in pursuit of new assignments and greater privileges that undermined inter-territorial solidarity, the raison d'être of the redistributive democratic State. Its weakening has been possible because the two main parties have needed the votes of the nationalists to guarantee governance, which they have been paying at a high price. But it is the PSOE, surrendering to the plurinational design of the PSC, which is leading this tribalization , from the moment it assumes as its formerly marginal positions such as those of the Union of the Leon People. What Zapatero started is taking Sánchez to paroxysm and for the same reason: the lack of scruples when it comes to subordinating, in his alliance policy, every sense of state to the conquest and conservation of power. That the Leonese socialists vote with Podemos the rupture of their community only proves that the PSOE has replaced in its claims class with identity and material inequality - the problems of Castile and Leon are called depopulation or aging - by historical victimhood. That is, it embraces a reactionary drift in which Podemos, depositary of the old self-determination logic of communism, acts as a necessary partner in the task of challenging the egalitarian ideal of 78.

That the motion voted in Leon reap a domino effect in three other municipalities of the province (at the moment) was coming. That other places like Cantabria or Teruel imitate the lucrative tactics of identity victimhood to exchange votes for investments, too. If the disloyalty led to the coup in Catalonia obtains the prize of a privileged interlocution - even bilateral - with the State for Sanchez's personal interest, pedagogy with respect to the value of unity and cohesion becomes impossible. It fails who should be the main lawyer of the case: the president.

If this trend sharpens, the institutional architecture of the Spain of autonomies will collapse, undermined at the same time by separatist tensions and by the symmetrical centralist reaction. Everything that was knotted in 1978 will be unleashed and will have to be redone. But without the political class of that time or the awareness that invited the overcoming of a dictatorship.

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  • José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
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