Catalans vote for their regional government, the Generalitat, on 1 November, All Saints’ Day. And a devil of a campaign the run-up is proving: supporters of eco-commies ICV have unofficially adopted the slogan Folla’t a la dreta (fuck the right wing); nominally leftist ERC separatists are lamely trying to convince Joe Public (who is against secession from Spain) that ERC candidates are “just like you”; Artur Mas, leader of CiU (Convergència i Unió, centre-right nationalists and Christian Democrats) has sworn in the presence of a notary-public that he’ll make no lasting pact with the PP (suggesting that any other CiU manifesto promises are Plasticine); socialist candidate José Montilla has challenged Mas to a face-to-face debate in Spanish on national TV, which Mas has declined, offering instead to joust with Montilla in Catalan on regional public TV, which Montilla has turned down. The impasse was broken by a TV3 round table show on 20 October with the presidential candidates of all five major parties - from left to right (in the photo above), Artur Mas (CiU), José Montilla (PSC), Josep Piqué (PP), Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira (ERC) and Joan Saura (ICV).

Chaired by the obsequious Josep Cuní, the debate was a messy affair, but a few salient points emerged. All parties except the PP are appealing to the electorate on the same grounds - Catalan nationalism, improvements in welfare and Elastoplasts for the housing crisis. Details of voucher systems, credit points for immigrants and access criteria for subsidised housing were glossed over as the candidates recriminated over broken promises and dodgy pacts. Mas was caught out lying twice, by Montilla and Piqué, and Saura summed up on air what most viewers must have felt - this was a laughable affair.

Cuní claims to be impartial (and interestingly remarked in an El Periódico interview that journalists have been under less pressure from PSC than they were in the CiU years), but he’s too concerned not to ruffle feathers for this to have been of any use to voters.

Far more controversial is a 55-minute DVD produced by CiU, a million copies distributed free with all the Sunday papers throughout Catalonia on 15 October, a day before the official fortnight-long election campaign began.

Devious DVD

As author of this Barcelona Reporter column, Catalonia Confidential, I was intrigued by ConfidencialCat, a title also in homage to James Ellroy. The DVD’s title also plays on the proliferation of “confidencial” rumour-monger websites, popular thanks to heavy self-censorship in Spanish mainstream media: ironically for CiU, as I write this, elconfidencial.com has a home page headline linking CiU with the Russian mafia. ConfidencialCat in fact contains no information that’s new to anyone even half-interested in Catalan politics; it’s all familiar anti-Tripartit muckraking from the last three years, reminding voters just how ham-fisted the government partners PSC, ERC and ICV have been, following 23 years of golden governance by Jordi Pujol’s CiU (1980-2003).

Although recent opinion polls show CiU in pre-election pole-position, they are not quite in sight of an outright majority, and ConfidencialCat aims to scare voters from the leftish Tripartit - and thus a repetition of the 2003 elections, where Artur Mas’s CiU gained most seats (though fewer votes than PSC) and felt robbed when ERC, holding the balance of power, opted to make Maragall, not Mas, president of the Generalitat.

Production and distribution costs for ConfidencialCat apparently amounted to €400,000, prompting Lluís Gavaldà of Catalan rockers Els Pets to ask “Who has paid for this DVD? Is it a swap for future favours?” The ICV party has suggested that CiU has already overstepped its lawful electioneering budget. CiU rivals immediately dismissed the DVD as “dirty” campaigning, and PSC went so far as to SMS sympathisers with instructions to bin the freebie (not only a mistake, endowing the DVD with the irresistible sheen of forbidden fruit, but a missed opportunity to reverse-spin the slurs). Catalonia’s public broadcaster CCRTV threatens legal action against CiU for using TV3 news footage without permission.

And indeed, ConfidencialCat feels more like a TV3 documentary than the dirt-digging exposé that its title seems to promise. The DVD’s omniscient, unidentified narrative voice-over is documentary-style, its news sources cited with the gravitas of television reportage, laying a mantle of credibility and veracity - spurious, of course, in the case of this deliciously partisan representation of recent history. CiU chieftains are interviewed as if by an independent producer, and pretensions of objectivity extend to pixelating out the faces of vox pop street interviewees.

Naming and blaming

What, according to ConfidencialCat, are the sins of the Tripartit? Biggest bogie man and an easy target is ERC leader Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira, fairly hammered in the DVD. Yet all these Carod cock-ups are already infamous: Carod holds talks with ETA in Perpignan, January 2004, while deputising for an absent President Maragall, who forces Carod’s resignation from the cabinet; Carod poses for a Maragall snapshot with a crown of thorns on a visit to Israel, and refuses to attend official events there because a flag of Spain is flying; Carod’s comment that Catalans shouldn’t support Madrid’s candidacy for the 2012 Olympic Games provokes a widespread boycott in Spain of Catalan products, chiefly Cava. ERC official Xavier Vendrell drags on Carod’s filthy coat tails as the bull-necked instigator of extortionate tithes from civil servants in ERC-run departments.

The vice of nepotism is justly scourged in the DVD: Maragall, Carod and Nadal all secured juicy Tripartit posts for their brothers. However, alimony-efficient Felip Puig conveniently overlooks two of his ex-wives on the Generalitat payroll, CiU’s justice minister Núria Gispert sorting out sis with a job during the 2003 interregnum and the friends-and-family precedents of the Pujolets, setting the tone for CiU millionaire-making over two decades, a huge incentive to become a party member.

CiU claims of Tripartit corruption look pretty lame when the DVD makes a meal of a family round trip in the official helicopter, by God, and the celebrated “three per cent” backhander hoo-hah would boomerang back on CiU if a proper investigation was ever launched into commissions on public works contracts. CiU spokesman Felip Puig, who looms large in this DVD, would be the first politico under suspicion.

Likewise David Madí, mastermind of the DVD and a vitriolic critic of the Tripartit’s manipulation of the media, was the guy doling out over 30 million euros to the Catalan commercial media the last time there was an election. The pot is blacker than the kettle.

Nigh on half a million euros has probably been wasted by Convergència i Unió on this piece of propaganda vapourware, judging by the reactions of most of the people I’ve talked to about ConfidencialCat. Catalans, in general, get sniffy about muck-raking, and this DVD is distinctly infra dig. It also smells of CiU sour grapes, and makes Mas and Co. look like bad losers.

The most pertinent comment over the affair came from José Montilla, cast by the DVD in the role of malign backroom Tripartit master-conspirator. PSC’s presidential candidate and Spain’s most famous charnego warned that the author of this DVD would be in charge of TV3 if Convergència wins on All Saints’ Day.

Pacts

Although Artur Mas’s noisily certified promise of no CiU-PP deal has been lampooned, at least it has brought some clarity to the otherwise murky pool of a hung parliament. PSC voters may hesitate if they suspect another pact with ERC, or even the grand coalition of PSC-CiU, the middle-class sociovergente de facto carve-up which dispenses power and influence in most administrative strata. Scrape under the cement of construction company Vertix, for instance, and you’ll find CiU funding skeletons alongside the PSC corpus. President Maragall, though differing in style and substance from President Pujol, appeals to the same broad social milieu.

Most tellingly, sociovergencia sway in the Generalitat would suit Zapatero’s PSOE central government, which can’t be seen to favour a pragmatic, power-hungry CiU over PSOE’s own Catalan branch PSC, but can’t risk another PSC-ERC pact, which would hamper Zapatero’s Basque strategy. The sociovergente thesis was strengthened on 17 October when CiU, uncharacteristically without any apparent quid pro quo, withdrew its objections to PSOE’s 2007 budget bill. Adding to sociovergente evidence, El País newspaper ran a story on 24 October citing secret meetings between CiU and PSC officials.

What am I suggesting? That a PSC vote may make Convergència’s Artur Mas president of the Generalitat. And Unió’s Josep Antoni Duran Lleida foreign secretary for Spain, it is rumoured (any Pallerols botín in the sealed diplomatic bag, Señor Duran?).

Not the End of History

With the red herring of Catalonia’s new Statute of Autonomy resolved to most people’s moderate satisfaction, politicos are floundering for want of emotive issues to woo the punters. The big issue for virtually all voters under 35, cheaper housing and easier rental terms, has nothing to do with nation-building, and real solutions have been studiously avoided, namely rigorous tax inspections, changes in Spain’s land laws to make town halls less reliant on land sale revenues, eliminating anonymous party donations to close the building permit backhander loophole, and charging individuals, companies and banks alike a notional rental tax on vacant properties. But underground plumbing is too difficult to be tinkered with, it seems.

In sixteen years as an observer of the Catalan political scene, I have never seen such perplexity and lack of focus in what has since the mid-seventies been Europe’s most fascinatingly feudal bartering ground. The cogitations above are probably only of passing academic interest to most readers of this column, like me unable to cast a vote one way or the other. But for the record, how would my ballot be marked?

As a journalist, I’d love to see CiU in the saddle again; their blend of clientelism and faux-nationalism makes for hilariously amateurish governance. I’d prefer them not to pact with ERC, who thrash about far better in opposition. ERC’s Joan Puigcercos and Josep Huguet were firebrands four years ago, but they have proven tame and circumspect in office.

As a taxpayer, give me PSC. To small-government right wingers, that might sound paradoxical, but the soft-socialists have given much better value for money than propaganda-profligate CiU, and I was amazed how quickly - in less than two years - they managed to straighten out the Generalitat accounts, left in near-total disarray in 2003. The Tripartit - all three deserve credit - have delivered more and better public services, and laid sound foundations for further improvement. (How galling it would be for them to watch CiU claim the credit in a year or two.)

As a liberal (of the old fashioned variety), the reviled PP are my only hope. President Piqué is impossible, of course, but try this on for a theorem: as outsiders to Catalonia’s established sociovergencia business clans, the PP would insist on merit criteria in public tenders, cultural promotion and possibly even job appointments, and they’d streamline institutional spending on flag waving. The PP in the Generalitat would, in a utilitarian way, bring the greatest long-term benefit to the largest number of people in Catalonia. But go tell it to catalanistas…

Since 2003 the number of immigrant voters registered in costas municipal elections has increased nine fold. In forty townships in Catalonia, Valencia and Almería, immigrants now represent over a third of the registered electorate, and climbing. Meanwhile the democratic deficit grows: they can appoint a mayor, but not a Generalitat president, nor, for that matter, the prime minister of Spain. But they - we - create wealth, pay taxes, have children, use healthcare, take transport and contribute to the cultural cocktail of the fiesta.

So with an eye on the future of Catalonia, desirous that democracy matches demographics, I’d donate my vote to the Ciutadans, whose glottal-perfect Catalan-speaking 27-year old candidate Albert Rivera wants something more generous and productive than an agenda stifled by nationalism. The Ciutadans don’t have a detailed policy manifesto, and as a minority party, they don’t really need one: good governance and the elimination of ethnic privilege are plenty to be getting on with. If the media here were less regimented, Ciutadans would gather up many of the disenchanted abstainers, a sizeable group, but public TV reporting rules - whereby coverage is proportional to seats won back in 2003 - mean that Ciutadans, a brand new party and therefore surely newsworthy, are invisible in the all-important TV campaign roundups.

And finally, into the realms of fantasy, savour this scenario. The sociovergente pact is sealed and by New Year PSC party discipline begins to crumble and socialist members of parliament, sick of being thwarted by CiU in charge of the Presidència, start defecting in 2007 to join the single Ciutadans MP, whose policy ideals are close enough to ICV for them to make a bloc. ERC joins them to punish CiU, and the PP holds the balance in parliament against a loyalist PSC rump and CiU. Parliament is dissolved and early elections called for autumn 2007…