Fallacy No 3: Ciudadanos

If you follow Catalan/Spanish politics, you will remember the set up of a political party named Ciudadanos/Ciutadans. On the 2006 elections, the party won 3 seats in the Catalan parliament in the province of Barcelona, getting just about 3.5% of the vote.

This party, and its supporters in the media, claimed at the time that this party was not bothered by matters of national identity and culture, but by things that matter to people: unemployment, energy prices, inflation, access to property, etc. In theory, a good proposition, isn’t it?

Well, if only. Those of us without blinkers in our eyes knew full well that this was a very good PR exercise encouraged by the most rabid nationalist outlets within the Spanish media, El Mundo and COPE, who took over from where El País, the original inventor of this farcical party, started.

The truth is that Ciudadanos is a party exclusively defined by its stance on national identity issues and by its policy of undermining the already precarious status of Catalan-language, and to threaten social cohesion in our cities and towns.

Ciudadanos has always been about being a Spanish nationalist, in the open, and confronting anyone or anybody who dared to pursue a policy of emancipation outwith a Spanish framework, at any level, for Catalonia.

The latest example of the Ciudadanos non-identitarian fallacy is their farcical intervention a few days ago. Instead of challenging the government on the issues that matter, as they told everyone they would, they brought to the attention of the Catalan parliament a football tournament:

http://www.avui.cat/article/mon_politica/34765/rivera/porta/una/samarreta/la/seleccio/espanyola/parlament.html

And that is the problem with Ciudadanos. Every one of their interventions are designed to undermine and attack a Catalan initiative in any given area, and at the same time use another Spanish-wide initiative as an example to follow.

Their politics of identity is accurately reflected in their website, which uses Catalan for headings and links, but all significant contents, including their key policy documents, are only available in Spanish. For Ciudadanos, Catalan, the language of Catalonia, is just a nuisance and something to put up with rather than protect and cherish.

If Ciudadanos were a party without an identity agenda, surely all their policy documents and party website would be available in both languages? Well, think again.

So these are the people who were elected on the basis of the new politics of non-nationalism: a bunch of resentful Spanish nationalists making a point about a football tournament.