How the long game in Catalonia can be won

Catalonia’s now ousted separatist leader Carles Puigdemont has to look for hopeful signs wherever he can get them. After Girona FC, his hometown soccer team, sensationally defeated Real Madrid 2-1 on Sunday, Puigdemont tweeted it was ‘an example and a reference for many situations’ — and added a winking emoticon.
In reality, the weekend’s events showed Puigdemont and other Catalan separatists aren’t even playing in the same league with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. That doesn’t mean Madrid can celebrate yet though. Future Spanish governments will need to negotiate a more lasting solution to the Catalan problem than the one Rajoy has offered.
Hours after the Catalan parliament’s declaration of independence last week, Rajoy fired the entire Catalan government, put Spanish government ministers in charge of its departments, replaced the top police officers in Catalonia, disbanded the Catalan parliament and called a new regional election for December 21. Under the Spanish constitution, Rajoy had the right to take over the regional government for six months, but by holding the election in eight weeks, he showed he didn’t want to run Catalonia a day longer than necessary.
Mostly, it’s an opportunity for Ciudadanos, which was the second party in the disbanded parliament, to win the election as pragmatic Catalans realize that Puigdemont jumped the gun on independence. Not a single country recognized Catalonia as an independent state after Saturday’s vote and about 1,700 businesses moved their legal address to other parts of Spain in recent weeks. Secessionists, except maybe the most radical ones, cannot afford to miss the election, and that puts them in a barely defensible position. For all his inflammatory talk of building a new nation, Oriol Junqueras, who was Puigdemont’s deputy in the Catalan government and who heads the most popular of the secessionist
parties, will be running for
re-election under Spanish rules.
There are quite specific things the Spanish government could do within the current constitution to make Catalans happier. Andreu Mas-Colell, a world-renowned microeconomics expert who was minister of economy and knowledge in the previous government until last year, told me there are three distinct things Catalans want: to assert a distinct cultural identity, to live in a less centralized country, and to fix economic transfers.
The identity part mainly revolves around the Catalan language, which, many Catalans feel, needs to be given priority to survive next to far more powerful and internationally prevalent Spanish. Centralization is not just about government; Spain, for example, has one of the world’s most extensive high-speed rail networks, but it’s built on a hub-and-spoke principle: To get from Barcelona to Valencia, also on the Balearic Sea coast, by high-speed train, one would have to go through Madrid at the country’s center.
Catalonia isn’t, contrary to a popular perception, Spain’s wealthiest region in per-capita economic output terms: The Basque Country, Navarra and Madrid are ahead of it. But it’s economically distinct from other regions.
The current Spanish system is based on the German example: The central government gets all the tax revenues (90 percent in Catalonia’s case) and then redistributes them to regions according to their size. Catalonia put a similar proposal on the table in 2012, asking to be given power to collect taxes and make two transfers to Madrid to help the poorer regions. Madrid rejected it, and, Mas-Colell says, “things have moved on so it would be hard to revive.”
Politicians, however, don’t stay in power forever. It’s possible that Spain’s Socialist Party, which is as pro-unity as the Popular Party but more willing to listen to Catalans, will be more inclined to negotiate expanded autonomy with a reasonable Catalan government that is more careful with its secession threats than Puigdemont’s cabinet was.
Despite the defiant appearances at their offices, the Catalan government cannot function without Spain’s consent, given that Madrid has its hands firmly on the purse strings. The acquiescence of the local police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, in the replacement of its commanders, is a sign that Rajoy, unlike Real Madrid, has won the weekend’s game and the losing side will need to clear the pitch. But the bigger problem remains unresolved: Catalonia will be a source of instability until its people are satisfied with the region’s level of autonomy (not independence, whatever the hotheads might say). Fixing that is a job for more flexible leaders with more long-term thinking.

— Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist
He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.