The Republic of Catalonia?

The rain is falling straight in the breezeless air.  The blue terrace tiles gleam with damp reflected depth.  I can hear the gentle wash of the sea and the occasional car.  The sky, as always, seems to have that particular bright dullness that I have come to expect on rainy days in Catalonia, always offering the promise of a glimpse of the sun some time later in the day.

It may just be me and my over romanticised sensitivity to the ‘significance’ of today, but the rain and the broken silence seem like examples of the pathetic fallacy as the depressing weather reflects the division and tension in what is a day of possible futures in Catalonia today.

Today is the referendum on Catalan Independence, where we have been asked to make a simple choice between the status quo and the proclamation of an Independent Catalan Republic.

The right wing minority government of PP with their leader Mariano Rajoy have been spectacularly inept in their handing of Catalonia, and today has provided yet another vibrant example of their idiocy.

When the President of Spain was forced to come to court a couple of months ago and give evidence in a wide ranging corruption trial he defended himself by saying that he was responsible for the ‘political’ direction of the party and not the financial side of the organization.  Leaving aside the unlikeliness of such a position for a moment, let’s concentrate on what he said he was responsible for: politics.

The one thing lacking throughout the lead up to the calls for a referendum and its implementation was political imagination.  PPs response to anything Catalan is always ‘No!’ 

You could take the dissatisfaction with Catalonia’s position in relation to the nation of Spain all the way back to 1714 and the Treaty of Utrecht when Catalonia supported (with British encouragement) the ‘wrong’ side in the War of the Spanish Succession when the preferred Catalan and British choice of the Hapsburg claimant was defeated by the Bourbon.  The defeat of the Catalan’s choice of monarch led to loss of status, land and independence. 

But the Catalans are a resourceful people and the loss of grain growing lands on the other side of the Pyrenees forced them to reconsider their mercantile basis and they developed the cloth trade, remnants of which you can still see in the corrugated roofs of obsolete factories in cities like Terrassa.

The Civil War in the 1930s changed everything and, while Catalonia fought hard and long for Republican ideals it was eventually defeated by Franco’s fascist forces aided and abetted by the axis powers of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

To the eternal shame of the Allied Powers, at the end of the Second World War Franco was allowed to stay in power as a perceived buttress against Communism and he lived on until the 1970s when he finally died and handed over the state to his preferred heir, the restored king.

Democracy and a new Constitution followed and the country started the transition from Fascism to Democracy.

We have now had some 40 years of democracy and the faults in the Constitution are beginning to show. 

Justice in Spain is political.  The separation between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial is, to put it mildly, hazy.  Too many judges are political appointees and those institutions that should be independent such as Constitutional and Supreme Courts are seen merely as an extension of the ruling party’s demesne rather than defenders of individual citizens rights.

Catalonia’s attempts to gain a more favourable arrangement with the central government centres on the Statute of Autonomy that was reformed in 2006, endorsed by the Catalans in a referendum and then rejected as ‘unconstitutional’.  This rejection has exacerbated Catalonia’s feelings of injustice and increased support for independence.  Massive demonstrations in Barcelona have left the central minority government of PP unmoved and they have contented themselves with a steady rejection of anything meaningful that the Catalan government has offered as a basis for negotiation.

For PP and their lackeys in the right-wing Cs party, any discussion about a referendum leading to independence was a no-go area.

In spite of clear indications that the movement towards a separate republic of Catalonia was growing, the central government showed itself to be flat-footed, unimaginative, arrogant and profoundly un-political.

PPs solution to the calling of the referendum was to declare that it would be illegal.  They prompted their friends in the other branches of government to pronounce on the illegality and unconstitutionality and then they sat back and proclaimed that the referendum would not take place.

Their complacency, arrogance and unreality merely provided fuel for the movement to free Catalonia from Spain.

I still maintain that this could have been prevented.  A few elections ago, the parliamentary majority of PP was wiped out.  PSOE (the rough equivalent of The Labour Party) and Podemos (a new left wing party) could have formed a government.  Neither of these parties was in favour of a break up of Spain, though Podemos conceded that allowing Catalonia a referendum was reasonable.

In a ‘what if’ situation, the two parties (with a little help from odds and ends of the left in parliament) could have granted a referendum some years in the future and then worked to make the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia more like that for the Basque Country.  It could then have been put to the Catalan people. 

It has been estimated that around 48% of the voters in Catalonia support independence with 50% against.  Almost 80% of Catalans wanted a binding vote on independence.  I maintain that, given the number of ‘Spanish’ people living and working in Catalonia, together with the large ex-patriot community, it probably would have been possible to present a re-worked relationship to the electorate and manage to get a convincing majority to stay with Spain.

That agreement between the parties did not happen.  The statistics refer to the past.  The actions of PP and the contempt that they have shown to Catalonia mean that the situation now is very different.

The right wing parties of PP and Cs, together with the ‘Labour’ party of PSOE all urged their followers to take no part in the referendum.  They all proclaimed the referendum as illegal and undemocratic.  All the opposition has played into the hands of the independence movement.  I myself (though I have no vote in this national election) have moved from being supportive of a united Spain to moving to a clear preference for the formation of the Independent Republic of Catalonia.

In the lead up to today and the referendum, the government of Rajoy and PP has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop the vote.

They have arrested members of the Catalan government.  They have drafted in thousands of Spanish National Police to Catalonia.  They have raided print works and confiscated ballot papers.  They have searched factories to discover the production points for ballot boxes.  They have closed down web sites.  They have threatened mayors who have indicated that they will hold the referendum.  They have locked schools where voting booths were to be set up.  They have waged a war of disinformation.  They have taken ballot boxes.  They have threatened and blustered and lied. 

And they have failed.

Today I drove Toni to our local heath centre and there he voted and I am proud to say that I drew the cross in the box indicating that we are in favour of the founding of the new country of Catalonia, independent of Spain and a Republic.

We first went to vote at lunchtime, but the scenes outside the centre were crowded and chaotic.  There were police there, but they were doing no more than observing and, as in any election, available to sort out any trouble.  There was no intimidation.

We returned later in the afternoon.  Crowds of people were there and they filled all the floors of the medical centre.  We had to wait a little while for the hidden ballot boxes (they had been moved to prevent their being taken by the police) reappeared and voting was able to go ahead.

That was not the situation throughout Spain and any glance at the news will show you the sometimes horrific scenes that illustrate what appears to be the gratuitous violence of the Spanish National Police against unarmed people queuing to vote.  OAP baton whipped, punched, kicked.  Voters thrown downstairs.  Rubber bullets (illegal in Catalonia) used against voters.  And the government in Spain has said that the actions of the Spanish National Police have been ‘proportionate’.

The silence from the EU has been deafening about what appear to be attacks orchestrated by a government against its own people who are trying to vote.  I fully support those people and organizations who have started proceedings in the European Parlimant against the apparent violence of the Spanish National Police and the actions of the Spanish State.

As I type, the polling stations have been closed fro two hours.  Results from the smaller settlements in Catalonia are beginning to come in.  People appear to have voted by the million.  If that is the case, then the referendum has produced a result that can be taken further.  Given everything that has been done by the central government to block, hinder and stop this vote any total above a couple of million is a triumph.

Given the apparent violence of the National Police; the failure of the government to stop what they called an illegal referendum taking place; the complete inability of the President to lead his party and the government; the numbers of people who voted in Catalonia - the consequent actions should be:

1              Rajoy must resign.

2              A General Election must be called

3              Catalonia must proclaim its independence

These are very interesting times to be living in Spain and especially in Catalonia.  It is now time to see whether our political masters have the wits and intelligence to live up to a new set of exciting possibilities and remake a broken country.