An election campaign poster ahead of December 21 Catalan regional vote. NurPhoto/Press Assoiation. All rights reserved.The Spanish central government has called for new elections in Catalonia this coming Thursday, December 21, with the official aim of re-establishing stability and the rule of law after a protracted crisis which peaked with the outlawed referendum on independence organised by the regional Catalan « government » last October 1.
Despite the – sometimes brutal – police intervention, voting was held almost throughout Catalonia, giving 90% votes in favour of independence. But with an abstention rate reaching 58%, mostly from anti-independence voters. Madrid at once declared the voting void, imposed a state of emergency based on article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, disbanded the elected autonomous government, put it under the control of the Spanish authorities, and sent to jail almost all the ministers they managed to grab – the head of government, « President » Carles Puigdemont, and four others ministers having fled to Brussels to avoid detention – as well as the leaders of the two main Catalanist popular movements.
We have all been following live this crisis that hardly any European – Catalans and Spanish excepted – had heard or bothered about before. Two political visions facing off at each other, the rule of law and order, period, vs. the right of peoples to decide on their own fate; the legitimacy of a five-centuries old centralised monarchy vs. the cry for independence from a people tracing its history since Charlemagne, proud of its traditions, culture and language suppressed by the Bourbon kings in the eighteenth century and by the Franco dictatorship in 1939 and which has elected autonomist, then independentist governments almost since Spain’s return to democracy in 1978.
