It is getting ever more surreal. The crestfallen Susana Diaz, leader of centrist PSOE in Spain’s largest province saw a dramatic drop in votes and seats in last Sunday’s election. She now says her one big mistake was not making a bigger noise about Catalonia. This, just as some Catalan political prisoners announce a hunger strike.

So what would Diaz have said? Likely a slightly milder version of the Right’s attack on Catalan aspirations for independence. So a provincial election in the Deep South of the Peninsula has apparently been decided by events in the far North.

The debate, such as it was, can be described as appealing to base instincts.

Those with a longer time frame will recognise that Catalan (and a little less though still significant for Basques) industrialisation was achieved with the sweat, toil and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Andalusians in waves spanning a century and a half.

By the early 1970s, over 700,000 Andalusians had emigrated to Barcelona to work in the factories. Others went to the even more industrialised Basque region, especially in the environs of Bilbao.

The push was the need to escape misery and poverty. The pull was the desire of Basque-Catalan industrialists for cheap, hard working labour.

The descendants of these immigrants live and work there.

Perhaps news, fake MSM news, personal accounts of what is happening in Catalonia filtered to their families and communities back in Andalucía over the last 14 months Could it really have been the main issue for one of Europe’s poorest provinces? Spain has ‘reduced’ its unemployment rate to 3.2 million. That’s meant to be good news.

Spain and Andalucía are failing economies, on ECB life support since 2011.

No bond purchases by Mario Draghi? No economy or rather back to 7% interest rates and state bankruptcy.

Andalucía, on the margins of Europe, is kept together on a monoculture of tourism, inefficient agriculture and land speculation. It is mainly a low technology low productive model that is lightyears behind from Germanic-Dutch-Scandinavian high tech industry.

The debate should have been about why Andalucía missed and keeps missing the boat.

Not many know that in the first half of the 19th century, a steel complex was established in the province. Before the Basques and not far behind the Catalans. Unfortunately, this putative drive for industrialisation was abandoned, ostensibly for lack of cheap fuel. That did not stop the Basques a few decades later. The latter imported the coal from Wales. Andalusian entrepreneurs could have done the same. But they succumbed to the pleasures of a Latifundio lifestyle, keeping their own rural people in utter poverty while splashing out in ostentatious consumption in Madrid and basque Biarritz.

Over a century later, the election of Felipe Gonzalez n 1981 was supposed to herald a new dawn. High speed train links at high expense was installed between Madrid and Seville. Then came the entry into the EU, billions in funds from Brussels and the cement producing property bonanza began.

Catalonia opted for a more balanced economy,. As did the Basques.

The financial crisis of 2008 has dealt a hammer blow to the Andalusian economy leading to a new wave of emigration, this time more to Northern Europe than northern Spain.

In reality, what petrifies much of Andalucía is the thought of an amputated Spain ‘losing’ 20% of its GDP if and when Catalonia leaves.

A diminished Spain would probably unravel with the Basques upping sticks and looking north to Core Europe.

What then Andalucía?

The Catalan independence movement has not convinced much of its population originally from other parts of Spain. Even though the independence movement is clearly not an ethnic based project.

Part of the problem is that the Catalan (and Basque) independence leadership have not offered a clear vision of what life would be like for a Spain, south of the River Ebro.

It seems like abandonment rather than emancipation (from a corrupt Spanish state).

How do the Catalans of Andalusian origin explain it at the dinner table on a visit to Córdoba, Malaga or Seville?

One might point to suggestions of a Mediterranean commercial corridor running from Barcelona to Malaga but there is precious little more meat on the bone.

Not only does the famous industrial belt around Barcelona need to be convinced that they will truly have equal rights and opportunities in an independent Catalonia but that there is also an economic benefit for Andalucía itself in a new configuration of states in Iberia – perhaps separated from Madrid.

The debate has to shift from arguing about the evident viability of Catalonia onto the place of Catalans of Andalusian origin (even of second and third generations) and also Andalucía itself.

Round One with its ‘ a por ellos’ and talk of ‘Reconquista’ in Andalucia, along with repression in Catalonia itself has completed the first phase.

Hunger strikes and the realisation that there will be no officially sanctioned referendum along with the rise of Spanish Nationalism in the Deep South (soon to fan northwards) means a new correlation of forces and ideas. For Catalonia as well as Andalucía.

Round Two now begins.