I’ve just spent a year based in Madrid, trying to understand Spain. I have travelled from Valencia to Cádiz, often on high-speed trains, pursuing a kind of glorious seafood-fuelled study mission. My preliminary conclusion: this is the world’s most liveable country, albeit even more for privileged foreigners than for the average Spaniard. But climate change could be particularly devastating here.
You’d think climate would be a hot dry country’s top priority, but in fact Spaniards spend more time arguing about national unity. Spain’s great modern trauma was Catalonia’s illegal referendum on independence in 2017. The federal government sent in baton-wielding police, and nine separatist organisers of the referendum were jailed for up to 13 years. In response, flags were hung from balconies nationwide as people expressed their visions of Spain. You can often read a neighbourhood’s political character just walking down the street: national flags in bourgeois Madrid neighbourhoods, various versions of Catalan flags in Barcelona, and elsewhere, increasingly, flags of other regions. Growing anxiety over national unity propelled the far-right nationalist party Vox into parliament in 2019.
Polarisation could worsen if the conservative People’s party and Vox win next year’s national elections and crack down on Catalonia. But for now, I’m impressed with how the Socialist-led government is defusing tensions, pardoning the jailed separatists and negotiating compromises – often grubby ones – with Catalanist parties. That’s how a multinational democracy is meant to work. Flags are coming down and Catalan support for independence is plummeting, partly as people realise it won’t happen: no foreign country recognised Catalan independence.