Catalonia: everything stays the same, so everything must change
"If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change", says the young aristocrat Tancredi to his uncle, the Prince, in the turmoil of Italian unification as portrayed in Lampedusa's novel The Leopard . Catalonia's election results on 21 December may be a matter of everything having to change because everything has remained the same. The results surprised mostly in how little change they showed in Catalan opinion and in Rajoy's response. Thus they have made the status quo pretty much untenable, short of all the parameters being changed by a large revival in Spain's sick economy. In...