The Diada as a parenthesis

The Diada is a reliable thermometer for taking the political temperature of Catalonia. It doesn't just serve to measure partisan fever. It's also useful for gauging the intensity of the citizenry. And the fact that this year's event will once again go unnoticed in terms of political impact speaks volumes about the current situation in the Catalan theater of operations.

During the effervescent years of the Catalan independence process , which many remember with longing and others with dread, each edition of the Diada marked a political turning point. Today, its impact will be null, as in recent years. And tomorrow, if I've seen you, I won't remember you.

There will be a demonstration and many people will attend, but the political significance will be less.

Not even the ruling by the High Court of Justice (TSJC), which yesterday overturned the decree by Pere Aragonés's government that sought to protect Catalan in schools, will alter the current pax romana. What once caused a fire is now barely enough for a bonfire. The Diada has returned to the realm of the ordinary.

There will be a demonstration, yes, and many people will attend. But the political significance will be less. Even in the cockpits of the pro-independence parties, the seismographs won't be moving. Sentimentality aside, for them, the Diada is currently a day to be overcome, but one that offers them no opportunity for political capitalization.

Only the hyperactive Silvia Orriols, the leader of the Catalan Alliance, dreams of taking something home. The woman from Ripoll, who will debut today at the Barcelona demonstration, has yet to understand that this is of secondary importance to her potential voters. If she were to stay home today eating tortell , roughly the same number of voters would vote for her, provided she continues to insist on using Catalan in her radical anti-immigration and anti-Muslim discourse.

Socialism has won not only the Generalitat, but also the terms on which political discourse is conducted in Catalonia and, consequently, also those on which the Diada is celebrated and read. With Salvador Illa siding with the independence movement on issues such as amnesty, language, and financing, the independence movement no longer has anything credible or exclusive to offer. The fact that this won't translate into socialist growth in the polls for a hypothetical Catalan election doesn't negate the underlying argument.

It is socialism, the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), who draw the lines of the playing field and who best exploit the dimensions of the field they themselves have drawn. The field they are running around in is that of an autonomous Catalonia that can and must improve some aspects of its self-government and that must fight institutionally to preserve its identity without neglecting the management of sectoral issues. This framework is accepted—in fact, it is also the one they play within, albeit in different ways—by those who claim to oppose it from the independence movement.

So the translation must necessarily be a Diada like the one being celebrated today, one that corresponds to a Catalonia that conducts politics in offices with little attention paid to the 11th of September. It would amount to a twenty-four-hour break from the film being shot in Madrid, on which all Catalans, whatever they think or vote, now have their eyes fixed on.

Another issue is the institutional nature of the date, the events and celebrations associated with it, the voice gaps in which some will call for the moon and others for the sun, or the final number of the demonstration, organized by Òmnium and the ANC.

It's not that we downplay these issues. We simply set them aside to focus solely on the day's political impact. And that will be zero. The Diada has returned to what it once was: a holiday on the calendar. Whether this makes some people cry and others, on the contrary, celebrate is a separate issue. We're merely revealing it here.