Luke Stegemann, Anglophone Hispanistas, and the Galician Election

Tldr: You can have a Spanish Spain or a united Spain, you can't have both. And Puigdemont and his friends are getting off the hook, whether by the hand of the PSOE or the PP remains to be seen.

There’s always an audience in Spain for anglophone experts (real and soi-disant)  on the country’s history and politics, with one proviso, their diagnosis of the nation's present state must be grim. Spaniards lap it up, “Look, this nice English/American/Irish/whatever professor says everything is indeed shit, so we don’t just think it ourselves. It’s true!”.

During the Catalan Autumn of 2017, the airwaves were thick with such people talking of the legacy of Franco and the supposed darkness of the Castilian character.

Here’s Luke Stegemann rehearsing a common trope of far-right critiques of the government.