A referendum worthy of the country we want

The president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, announced yesterday the date and question for the referendum he had promised for the Catalan people to make a peaceful, democratic decision on their future. Most Catalans would prefer an agreement with Spain. However, the referendum is opposed by the machinery of the state and, as such, it has been announced in a climate of growing political tension. This is not the ideal scenario. To understand how we have got to this point, we should go over the events of the last few years.

In our opinion, the problem begins when the Partido Popular (PP) —and part of the PSOE, along with the apparatus of the state— refused to understand that the 2006 draft Catalan Statute was a pragmatic, loyal attempt to find a better fit for the aspirations of Catalonia within Spain. The hostility unleashed by the campaign against the Statute, with an ignominious signature petition throughout Spain organised by PP and, above all, with the blatantly partisan use of the Constitutional Court to disfigure a law that the Catalan people had approved in a referendum, steamrollered the political efforts to find a fairer, more balanced relationship. In this sense, the Constitutional Court’s verdict constrained Catalonia’s self-government and made the national recognition of Catalonia impossible, thus ending the spirit of compromise enshrined in the 1978 Constitution, which had left the door open to a more flexible, respectful reading of Spain’s Fundamental Law on the subject of its regions.

Even today, constitutional scholars who favour a united Spain —such as the Andalusian Javier Pérez Royo or the Catalan Xavier Arbós— argue that this open interpretation of the spirit of the Constitution is possible, but several rulings by the Constitutional Court have, one by one, closed all the doors, with not a crack left. The ability to negotiate and the recognition that Spain is neither uniform nor homogenous deteriorated with the election of a PP government in 2011. The breaches of the Statute (which is, by the way, no ordinary law but a basic Spanish “organic law”), the recentralisation of powers, the application of a uniform, recentralising agenda, the de facto takeover of Catalonia’s finances and the suffocating imposition of unequal deficit objectives which jeopardise the basic provision of services to the citizens of Catalonia, the failure to approve a new system of regional financing, substituted instead for a perverse system of liquidity control, the attacks on schooling in Catalan, and more have driven the political relationship into the ground.

Meanwhile, however, Catalan society didn’t keep still. As early as 2009, with the symbolic independence votes that started in Arenys de Munt, a powerful popular movement appeared which crossed ideologies and generations and crystallised in the Catalan National Assembly, founded in 2012. There then started a wave of popular rallies in favour of independence which surprised the world, both for their size and for the extremely civil and peaceful behaviour of the participants.

Then-president Artur Mas visited Madrid on 20 September 2012 with a proposal to defuse the situation, the fiscal pact, which was rejected by Spanish president Mariano Rajoy. Since then, all the calls made to Madrid to bring a proposal for Catalonia to the table have been met with the same response: inaction and the inability to negotiate. Not even a massive turnout of 2.3 million people in the unofficial independence referendum on 9 November 2014 could prompt the Spanish government to act. Quite the opposite: after having underestimated it, they acted offended and decided to make examples of the politicians responsible, who have faced legal proceedings and bans from public office. But it didn’t end there. With the so-called Operation Catalonia, the Spanish state crossed the line of democratic decency: “patriotic” police units, leaks of fabricated evidence and plotting smear campaigns in the office of the Interior minister himself.

In this context, the Catalan elections of 27 September 2015 —seen as a plebiscite of sorts on independence— were held. The outcome was thorny: while it indeed didn’t allow for the claim that a majority of Catalans had voted in favour of independence (pro-independence coalitions JxSí and CUP totalled 48% of the votes), it honestly didn’t allow for the opposite claim, either. The avowedly unionist parties (C’s, PSC and PP) were stuck on 39% with two parties that didn’t want to be counted with either side (CSQP and UDC) getting 11.5%.

The independence movement understood that it needed to pass the 50% mark clearly and resoundingly and has, therefore, bet on a return to the polling stations. The Spanish government, however, has maintained its attitude of arrogance and ignorance, as demonstrated with the intangible and content-free Operation Dialogue. This is the context that has led us to this point. Because of this, they cannot ask us to remain neutral between a Spanish state that scorns the rights of its citizens and a Catalan government that, democratically, tries to consult its people as to what future they want.

Having said that, the Catalan government must read the situation carefully, should be aware of the limitations imposed by forces both internal and between Catalonia and the state, and scrupulously persevere in its respect for the democratic and civil actions that have characterised the Catalan independence movement. Guarantees and an informed, transparent and pluralistic campaign are needed. Only in this way will the broad-based demand for and the legitimacy of a referendum be able to vanquish the resistance of a deaf, directionless Spanish state.