We will vote again, we will win again

November 25^th will be a historic date. These elections will be the first ones where the votes from the Catalan people will be valid in order to get prosperity. For the first time ever, Catalan people will be able to vote for freedom and for their economic wellbeing, two of our best qualities. So, among all, these elections are the plebiscitary ones. That is the way we have to live them as well as deciding the sense of our vote. There is a lot to win and, consequently, if the results do not go the way we want to, there is lot to lose too. We are voting to be a State within the EU – prosperous – or to be just an autonomous region of the decadent and shady Spain.

These elections have to be also the first ones in which we put reasons and national causes to the ideological ones. I want to remind my readers that when Catalan people have put ideological conflict to other reasons we have always lost.

On the background of the elections there is clash of powers and economic interests. This is the first time when the Catalan economic power openly faces the Spanish one. This confrontation between these two antagonistic powers can be explained with five phases:

1) It is true that the nation is awake and that the rally held on September 11^th has been the trigger of this process. Nevertheless it would be naive to think that the Catalan economic power has not actively contributed in a way or another. The citizens were not alone.

2) By several surveys it has been demonstrated that during last weeks the majority of the Catalan business sector – we must remember that most of the companies in this country are small-medium ones – is in favour of an own state.

3) The Catalan business sector – really conservative- has changed its traditional position which has caused the change of position of “Convergència i Unió” (Catalan centre-right coalition party – CiU). CiU, who has been the main political force in the Catalan government since the democratic recovery, has been able to check out the economic logic: Spain is not a good business anymore for Catalonia (we should wonder if it has ever been), so we have to leave Spain as soon and fast as possible.

4) This combination of interests is what makes possible the moment we are living becomes historic. For the very first time in many years, fortunately, all the political, economic and social interests match up again. Whenever there has been this triple coincidence in Catalonia it has generated wealth. We have managed to make it through. This coincidence has taken place because we have all realised that the business is even bigger than the one of the dependence. Much more, the dependence is taking us into an economic ruin as well as negating us as a nation.

5) We know that nowadays economic interests are only transitory, so we have to wait for the big European lobbies to support, just for economic reasons, our process of secession. The global market needs the south of Europe to be the engine of its economy, not the brake of it, and Catalonia can be – it has done it before through history – the locomotive.

The European Union has been able to verify that the politics based on the grounds of structural cohesion have become a failure. Spain has been a well without any funds and it would have been worse with proposals such as the central train corridor if Europe has not forced them to follow our ways. Europe knows that Spain has not invested the incentives into programs to generate a productive economy but in useless infrastructures that have been the answer to the politic and anti-Catalan criteria.

Europe already knows who Spain is. Europe knows quite well its speeches, its tricks and the arrogance of the Spanish ruling classes.  Europe knows that the new Catalan state can be a good tool in order to dynamize and modernize the Spanish economy as well as being the revulsive that southern Europe needs to stabilize the Euro.

We are living an historic moment and we have to take the most of it. The big lobbies and the power groups are already working for Catalonia therefore they will not let one of their more fertile territories of the south to end up by being a waste land, a decadent and poor economy. Europe needs us and it needs us free because this is the only warranty of prosperity.

We will vote again and, this time, we will win again.

Ramon Carner i Alivés

President of the Catalan Circle of Business.