Pro Catalan independence rally In Barcelona, September 2015. Jordi Boixareu/ Flickr. Some rights reserved.Developments in Catalonia have caught the attention of the worldwide media over the last few years. Since 2012 Catalans have experienced huge civic mobilisations claiming the right to democratically decide their futures. During these last few years many Catalans have stopped believing that they can indeed have a better country inside the Spanish State. The Catalan Government and Parliament have taken each and every possible step to organise a self-determination referendum so that people can choose. Unfortunately, this has all been in vain.
Being a mayor of a Catalan town myself, I initiated two specific actions during the past few weeks after the vote that took place on 27 September. The first action was to organise a remembrance for former President Lluís Companys on the eve of his execution at the hands of Spanish Francoist authorities in 1940.
Lluís Companys, who was head of the Catalan Government as well as president of my party Esquerra Republicana, remains the only democratically elected President to be murdered for political reasons while still in office throughout the whole of European history. After the fall of Barcelona, Companys went into exile in France where he was then detained by the Gestapo in Brittany and handed over to the Spanish authorities. In Spain he faced a fake military trial and was finally executed in Barcelona’s Montjuic fortress. By killing a man, the fascists tried to eliminate a country. As others had tried to do so many times before.
