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	https://www.ft.com/content/8540cba2-44a6-11e9-a965-23d669740bfb

	Spanish foreign minister warns of ‘existential’ election
Josep Borrell says rivals are inciting conflict in dispute over Catalonia
Josep Borrell, Spain's outgoing foreign minister, says the government has tried to change the tone of the dispute over Catalan separatism or 'reduce the inflammation' © AP

David Gardner in Madrid March 13, 2019
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Spain’s election next month will be of “existential importance”, the country’s outgoing foreign minister has warned.

Josep Borrell said Spain’s democracy was being undermined by a culture of insult and incitement, in particular by ever more radical rightwing and Catalan separatist parties that feed off each other.

“We are playing with fire,” Mr Borrell told the Financial Times in an interview in Madrid. “There is a systematic exacerbation of tension and conflict, incited by people from both sides because that is what they live off.”

Spain will vote on April 28 in a general election precipitated by the failure of Socialist party prime minister Pedro Sánchez to win backing for a budget. Mr Sánchez formed a minority government last June when Mariano Rajoy of the Popular party lost a confidence vote following a corruption scandal.

Mr Borrell was regarded as a heavyweight in the Sánchez administration, having been a minister under Felipe González in the 1980s and ’90s, a former leader of the Socialist party (PSOE) and president of the European Parliament. He is expected to move to the European Commission in Brussels if the Socialists can form a new government after the election.
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This is widely thought to be the most wide open contest since the restoration of Spain’s democracy, following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 and the dismantling of the dictatorship he forged after a fascist victory in the 1936-39 civil war.

Polls suggest the PSOE will beat the PP, its traditional centre-right rival, but will struggle to form a coalition against the right assuming the PP allies with Ciudadanos (Citizens), a self-proclaimed liberal party, and Vox, a new force that has erupted on the far right.

These three parties in December formed an alliance after a regional election in Andalucía. Since then, Ciudadanos has tilted to the right and ruled out any post-election pact with the PSOE.

Pablo Casado, the new young leader of the PP, has raised hackles by calling for a rightist front to defeat the “Popular Front” — a reference to the republican government that preceded the civil war. Vox, which presents itself as the shield defending Spain from separatist dismemberment, aspires to abolish the system of devolved government that followed Franco’s iron centralism.

The rise of Vox owes much to the botched secession attempt in Catalonia in 2017, for which a dozen separatist leaders are on trial at the Supreme Court in Madrid. Separatism in Catalonia leapt from the margins to the mainstream after Spain’s Constitutional Tribunal in 2010 struck out key articles in a reformed statute of autonomy.

Mr Borrell, a Catalan but an uncompromising unionist, said the government had tried to change the tone of the dispute over Catalan separatism or “reduce the inflammation”. But “we can’t resolve imaginary problems” for separatists who “live in a virtual world”, he said.

Dialogue cannot work if you keep “crashing into demands impossible to accept”, such as the Catalan nationalist insistence on a right to secede denied by Spain’s 1978 constitution, he said.

The foreign minister described as “incomprehensible” the decision of Ciudadanos to veto a centre-left alliance with the PSOE, as its young leader Albert Rivera seeks to replace the PP as the standard-bearer of the right, warning that this was further polarising the country.
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“What message is this sending to voters? They are trying to say the PSOE has no other option but to depend on the separatists, and that the right can only govern with the extreme right,” Mr Borrell said. “This is an invitation to extreme instability [and] whoever wants this is damaging the country.”

A government of a tripartite right, according to Mr Borrell, would exacerbate “the territorial tensions” within Spain, lead to a “huge regression” in women’s rights and civic freedoms, and would “question European integration in very sensitive areas like immigration”.

In Europe, Mr Borrell said Spain could capitalise on the UK’s departure from the EU and was ready to become more assertive alongside France and Germany, which he said were “indispensable but insufficient”.

“It is time we move from being pious Europeans to more critical Europeans” and to “define the Europe we want”, Mr Borrell said, warning of dangers to things taken for granted, such as a border-free Europe.