Ceaseless forgiving in Spain

Any democracy fragmenting over political differences might take a lesson from Spain in recent days on how to build unity.

Last week, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sustained a political loss when a bill offering amnesty to separatists from the province of Catalonia was voted down in parliament. The blame for the loss went to one of the secessionist parties, Together for Catalonia, or Junts. Some in Spain called for reprisals. But the government has responded instead with compassion.

Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years. The effects are direst in Catalonia, which hasn’t seen rain in more than a thousand days and last week declared a state of emergency. Madrid yesterday announced a plan to invest $502 million in new desalination plants in Catalonia and will soon start shipping in water. That follows an earlier decision to forgive $17.5 billion owed by the province to the national government in debt and interest.

The amnesty bill, which has now gone back to committee for further debate, and the drought and debt measures reflect a patient, ongoing effort by the prime minister to heal divisions through “dialogue, generosity and forgiveness,” as he said last November. Mr. Sánchez took office in 2018, just eight months after the Junts held a referendum on Catalonia independence despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring the ballot unconstitutional.

Unlike attempts at reconciliation in other countries with high conflict, his approach has not made forgiveness conditional on terms such as remorse or disclosure. He sees reconciliation as a shared and negotiated outcome between two sides of a dispute. Forgiveness, as many theologians note, is an individual act – “a private and ongoing discipline of mind, heart, and soul,” wrote Loyola Press author Vinita Hampton Wright.

It can also require grace from one side. Forgiveness “can be done not by the one who is more at fault, but by the one who has more mental and spiritual strength,” wrote Stanisław Glaz, a professor at Jesuit University Ignatianum in Kraków, Poland.

The amnesty bill triggered street protests from hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader who fled into exile in Belgium following the referendum to avoid arrest, has said Catalonians need not ask for forgiveness because they have done nothing that needs to be forgiven. That has not dissuaded Mr. Sánchez. In 2021, he pardoned nine secessionist leaders jailed for their roles in the separatist bid.

“Almost always to reach an agreement,” he said then, “someone has to take the first step. We are going to rebuild social harmony from respect and regard. We cannot start from scratch, but we can start again. We love you Catalonia.”

Will that soft approach be just the right solvent? As Omar Encarnación, a chaired professor of politics at Bard College in New York, noted recently, support for secession has dropped sharply in Catalonia since 2017 – below 40% in one recent poll.

It “remains unclear that Sánchez can sell amnesty to a very skeptical Spanish public,” Professor Encarnación wrote in Foreign Affairs. But “restoring peace to Catalonia is a step in the right direction.”