Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Catalonia

Analysis and commentary about the independence crisis in Catalonia by Nick Ottens (based in Barcelona) and Ainslie Noble (an expert in Basque and Catalan identity issues).

  • Sánchez Should Offer Catalans a Federal Spain

    Sagrada Família Barcelona Spain
    Aerial view of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain (Unsplash/Carles Rabada)

    Pedro Sánchez’ chances of remaining prime minister narrowed on Saturday, when the votes of almost 234,000 Spaniards living abroad were counted. His Socialist Workers’ Party lost one seat in Congress to Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s conservative People’s Party. The left- and right-wing blocs would have 171 seats each, assuming Sánchez can convince the two Basque nationalist parties and the center-left Republicans of Catalonia to support him.

    The center-right Canarian Coalition, with one seat, and the centrist Junts (Together) of Catalonia, with seven seats, would hold the balance of power.

    The Canarians refuse a deal that includes Vox (Voice). Feijóo has no realistic path to a majority without the far-right party, which won 33 seats. But the Canarians are unlikely to vote for Sánchez either. They may abstain.

    Junts‘ demand — an independence referendum in Catalonia — is unacceptable to Sánchez. But the Basque branch of his Socialist Party has a plan that might just win Junts over: a federal Spain. (more…)

  • Spanish Election Gives Power to Separatists

    Pedro Sánchez
    Prime Ministers António Costa of Portugal, Pedro Sánchez of Spain and Stefan Löfven of Sweden attend a meeting of European socialist party leaders in Brussels, October 15, 2020 (PES)

    An election that centered on Spanish identity has handed power to parties from the two regions that most clearly define themselves against it: the Basque Country and Catalonia.

    Neither Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’ left-wing bloc of the Socialist Party and Sumar (Unite), nor a combination of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s conservative People’s Party and the far-right Vox (Voice), will have a majority in the next Congress, which convenes in August. Basque and Catalan nationalists won enough seats on Sunday to decide who becomes the next prime minister.

    Sánchez holds the best cards despite placing second. He governed with the support of Basque and Catalan parties before. But they may ask for more this time than he is willing to give.

    The odds are against Feijóo. He grew his party from 89 to 136 seats, and claimed victory on Sunday night, but he would need both the anti-regionalist Vox and one of the four regional parties from the Basque Country and Catalonia for a majority. That is an improbable combination. His best hope is that Sánchez will fail too and the country must hold a repeat election next year. (more…)

  • Spanish Election Could Reignite Catalan Independence Crisis

    Barcelona Spain
    Columbus Monument in Barcelona, Spain (Unsplash/Benjamin Voros)

    The outcome of Sunday’s election in Spain could usher in a new period of confrontation with the independence movement in Catalonia.

    If, as the polls predict, the conservative People’s Party and far-right Vox (Voice) win a majority, the next government would be far more hostile to Catalan interests than Pedro Sánchez’, a coalition of the Socialists and far left.

    The last major protests were in 2019, when nine of Catalonia’s leading separatists, including the region’s former vice president, were convicted of sedition for organizing a referendum on independence. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Barcelona and smaller Catalan cities. At night, trashcans were burned and there were altercations with police. (more…)

  • Catalan Socialists Learn from Their Mistakes

    Salvador Illa
    Catalan Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa listens to his Basque counterpart, Eneko Andueza, making a speech, January 16 (Socialistas Vascos)

    Catalonia’s Socialists missed an opportunity after the last election to split up the region’s left- and right-wing independence parties. The moderate Republican Left, which supports a Socialist government nationally, had tired of the hardliners in Together for Catalonia (Junts), but local Socialist Party leader Salvador Illa wouldn’t accept anything short of the presidency for himself.

    “Why should I invest a person that I defeated at the polls?” he remarked of the Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès.

    Illa won 50,000 more votes than the Republicans, but both parties got 33 out of 135 seats. Aragonès claimed the presidency too, but he had two paths to a majority, not one. Illa’s intransigence drove the Republicans into the arms of Junts.

    But the coalition proved short-lived and Illa has recently set his ego aside. (more…)

  • Sánchez Cleans Up Mess Conservatives Made in Catalonia

    Pedro Sánchez
    Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez chairs a meeting of Socialist Workers’ Party lawmakers in Madrid, June 1 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)

    Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s independence leaders were imprisoned — and the right has gone berserk. Conservative deputies called the penal reforms an “assault on democracy”. The far right called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a “traitor”. (They do so frequently.)

    When the reforms came to a vote in Congress, members of the conservative People’s Party (PP) sat on their hands. The center-right Citizens and far-right Vox (Voice) walked out in protest. So much for their commitment to democracy.

    Indeed, it was the PP’s disinterest in Catalan democracy that culminated in the imprisonment of half the Catalan government and the suspension of Catalan home rule. Sánchez is doing little more than clean up the mess they made. (more…)

  • Separatist Hardliners to Quit Catalan Government

    Pere Aragonès
    Catalan president Pere Aragonès speaks at a distribution center in Oliana, Spain, July 22 (Generalitat de Catalunya)

    Members of Catalonia’s ruling center-right party have voted to quit the government. Both ruling parties — Together for Catalonia on the right and the Republicans on the left — want independence from Spain. They disagree about how to achieve it.

    56 percent of Together’s 6,500 members voted to end the coalition. 79 percent took part in the vote, which was called after regional president, and Republican party leader, Pere Aragonès fired his Together deputy, Vice President Jordi Puigneró.

    Neither man revealed the details of their dispute, but the Republicans and Together have been at odds for months. The former want to give talks with the Spanish government, which is also center-left, a chance. Together has lost what little faith they had in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. (more…)

  • Catalan Separatists March, But Are Divided

    Barcelona Spain demonstration
    Catalans demonstrate for independence in Barcelona, Spain, October 14, 2018 (Unsplash/Külli Kittus)

    Hundreds of thousands of separatists streamed into Barcelona on Sunday. A mass of red, yellow and blue — the colors of Catalan independence — filled the boulevard along the city’s old seaport before crowding Ciutadella Park, where the regional parliament is located.

    Organizers claimed 700,000 Catalans attended this year’s National Day rally. Barcelona police put the figure at 150,000, which would make attendance by far the lowest since demonstrations began in 2010. El Nacional, a pro-independence outlet, argues the low estimate isn’t credible, but 700,000 seems high given this year’s shorter route.

    Whatever the number, it’s clear the separatist movement has peaked. As many as one million (on a population of 7.7 million) demonstrated for independence as recently as 2018.

    The failed breakaway of 2017, that year’s suspension of Catalan autonomy and the prosecution of Catalan leaders (later pardoned) have demotivated many separatists. Polls suggest four in ten Catalans still want their own state. It was close to fifty-fifty in 2019. (Although even then, almost half of independence supporters would have been content with federalizing Spain.) (more…)

  • Sánchez Finds New Excuse to Avoid Catalan Talks

    Pedro Sánchez Jens Stoltenberg
    Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg attend the NATO summit in Madrid, June 28 (NATO)

    Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has found a new excuse for not talking with Catalan leaders: they don’t want to talk with him.

    Catalan lawmaker Gabriel Rufián, whose Republican Left usually votes with Sánchez’ minority left-wing government, asked the prime minister in Congress when the negotiations he promised at the start of his term would resume. Sánchez argued they could only continue if Together for Catalonia, the region’s second-largest independence party, rejoined the negotiating table.

    But the reason Together walked out is that Sánchez has delayed negotiations for two-and-a-half years. (more…)

  • Sánchez Takes Risk by Snubbing Catalans

    Pedro Sánchez
    Prime Ministers António Costa of Portugal, Pedro Sánchez of Spain and Stefan Löfven of Sweden attend a meeting of European socialist party leaders in Brussels, October 15, 2020 (PES)

    At what point will Catalonia’s Republican Left decide enough is enough?

    The separatists have kept Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in power for two-and-a-half years, but I argue in EUobserver they have little to show for it.

    Sánchez most recently did a deal behind Catalans’ backs with conservatives to reduce subsidies for independent film and television productions, including those made in Catalan. The subsidies were the only concession Republicans had wrangled out of Sánchez’ Socialist Party in budget talks last year.

    The about-face could be the final straw. “You have destroyed the agreement you had with us, which cost us a lot, which we defended to the end,” Republican Joan Margall told Socialist deputies in Congress. (more…)

  • What Conservative Spain Has in Common with Putin

    Barcelona Spain
    View of the Palau Nacional from downtown Barcelona, Spain, December 29, 2013 (CucombreLibre)

    There are parallels between Vladimir Putin’s need to dominate Ukraine and right-wing Spain’s intolerance of Catalan nationalism.

    Modern Spain wouldn’t bomb Barcelona. Putin’s aggression is in a league of its own. But the last conservative government of Spain did send riot police into Catalonia when it organized an independence referendum in defiance of Spanish courts. It did depose the regional government, arrest its leaders and sentence them to between nine and thirteen years in prison for inciting “sedition” and participating in a “rebellion”. It did hack the phones of dozens of Catalan separatists, including non-politicians, to read their messages and listen to their conversations.

    Putin uses tanks, conservative Spain the law, but their motivation is the same: neither can accept the independent aspirations of a people they refuse to recognize as separate from themselves. (more…)

  • Sánchez Can No Longer Ignore Catalonia

    Pedro Sánchez
    Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez speaks at a meeting of his Socialist Workers’ Party in Madrid, April 9 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)

    The revelation that dozens of Catalonia’s separatist leaders were hacked should compel Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez to finally make good on his promises to the region.

    The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto, Canada, discovered that at least 65 Catalans, ranging from the president of the region to its members of the European Parliament, were targeted or infected with an Israeli spyware that is only sold to governments. Spain’s National Intelligence Center hasn’t confirmed it was behind the hacks, but who else would be interested in spying on Catalan leaders?

    Catalans didn’t have much faith in the Spanish government to begin with. This news threatens to shatter what little hope there was of negotiating a way out of the impasse that has lasted for five years.

    “It is really hard to trust anyone when everything points to the fact that they’ve been spying on you,” Catalan president Pere Aragonès told reporters.

    Imagine if the British government had been listening in on the conversations of Nicola Sturgeon and her cabinet. Would Scots still trust London to negotiate in good faith?

    The difference, of course, is that the United Kingdom recognizes Scotland’s right to self-determination and allowed the country to hold an independence referendum in 2014 whereas Spain sent riot police into Catalonia and suspended the region’s autonomy when it voted to break away in 2017. (more…)

  • Catalan Support for Independence Down, Autonomy Up

    Barcelona Spain
    Basílica de Santa Maria del Pi in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, Spain (Egor Myznik)

    Spanish media widely reported this week that support for Catalan independence is down.

    Most media have learned not to read too much into any one poll, and report averages or trends instead. Spain’s not so much.

    I’m not surprised conservative newspapers like ABC and El Mundo would make hay out of the story. They have been trying to convince their readers Catalan independence is a fringe movement for many years. I am disappointed the center-left El País and Basque El Correo didn’t give their readers more context. (more…)

  • Catalans Bear Brunt of Spanish Judicial Activism

    Quim Torra
    Quim Torra enters the parliament of Catalonia to be sworn in as regional president, May 14, 2018 (Parlament de Catalunya/Miguel González de la Fuente)

    Catalan nationalists, up to and including the deposed regional president Carles Puigdemont, see the Spanish judiciary as part of a “deep state” that frustrates Catalan ambitions at every turn.

    That diminishes the meaning of the term “deep state”. Spain isn’t Egypt or Turkey.

    It does have judges who are more political, and more reactionary, than the rest of Western Europe. I saw the consequences after more than two million Catalans defied a Constitutional Court ban to vote in an independence referendum in 2017. (I lived in Barcelona at the time.) Politicians and protest leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Spanish courts overturned a Catalan presidential election. As recently as last week, judges ordered a Catalan lawmaker to give up his seat in the regional parliament. Spanish “lawfare” against the Catalan independence movement has entered its fifth year. (more…)

  • Catalan Budget Crisis Is Tied to Independence

    Plaça de Catalunya Barcelona Spain
    Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, June 23, 2014 (Pixabay/Elena Repina)

    One of my laments about Spain’s inability to resolve the Catalan independence crisis is that it complicates all other political issues in the region.

    Catalonia’s pro-independence Republican Left has much in common with the Socialists and other left-wing parties, which want to remain in Spain. The formerly center-right Together for Catalonia now calls itself a big tent, but its economic and fiscal policies are still similar to those of the unionist Citizens and People’s Party. Yet separatists and unionists refuse deals, giving two far-left parties in parliament the balance of power. One is reasonable, the other is not.

    The reasonable one, Catalonia in Common (which includes the Catalan branch of Podemos), supports Catalan self-determination but not independence, which is why it can’t join a government that wants to exit Spain.

    The even more left-wing Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) is also the most strident separatist party: it would take Catalonia out of Spain tomorrow if it could. It has reliably backed governments of the Republicans and Together for Catalonia, but it has been fickle in its support for their policies. (more…)

  • Catalan-Spanish Talks Accomplish Little

    Pedro Sánchez Christian Kern António Costa
    Spanish, Austrian and Portuguese social democratic party leaders Pedro Sánchez, Christian Kern and António Costa attend a meeting in Lisbon, December 2, 2017 (PES)

    The good news is that Catalan and Spanish politicians are talking again. Official dialogue between the regional and central governments was resumed this week after a year-and-a-half delay due to COVID-19.

    But that’s the only good news. A meeting on Wednesday ended without agreement. A solution to the longrunning dispute between Spain and its wealthiest region is still out of reach. (more…)