Photograph by the author
Tomorrow, the Catalan parliament will vote on one or more motions relating to the right to hold a referendum on independence for Catalonia in a context of considerable confusion amongst the parties elected there in late November.
Following a 1.5 million-strong pro-independence demonstration in Barcelona in early September 2012, and a subsequent bruising encounter with Spanish PM Rajoy where his pitch for a more favourable financial settlement for Catalonia was rejected out of hand, Catalan PM Artur Mas dissolved the Catalan parliament and asked the electorate for a ‘significant majority’ to pursue a policy of independence, though he was coy about articulating the word. However the electorate refused to play ball and although it returned Mas’s CiU coalition group as the biggest party, it cut their representation from 62 to 50 in the 135-member parliament.
Fortunately for Mas, the left republican party ERC doubled its representation to 21 and made a pact with Mas to support his investiture as PM in return for an almost cast-iron guarantee that a referendum on independence would be held before the end of 2014; unless some element of political force majeure intervenes, that is. Yet the leader of ERC Senyor Junqueras not only refused to enter into any formal coalition with CiU but also exercised his legal right, set out in the statutes of the Catalan parliament, as head of the second largest party in parliament to be leader of the opposition. So CiU soldiers on alone day to day in the midst of a continued severe economic crisis, trying to confront the Spanish Government and constitution as a minority government with a much reduced representation.
In the seven-party parliament elected in 2012 the 71 seats of apparently pro-independence deputies for CiU and ERC is mirrored, though not matched, numerically by two parties viscerally hostile to Catalan independence. The first with 19 seats is the conservative PP, which currently provides the national government in Madrid with a rare clear majority in the Cortes and the second is Ciutadans with nine seats. Inevitably, the other three parties have the power of either delivering or stymieing the ‘significant majority’ in parliament which any pro-referendum vote would need, especially given the intransigent provisions of the Spanish constitution which outlaws secession.
From smallest to largest, these parties are the ‘anti-establishment’ extreme left CUP which never achieved parliamentary representation before. Although its solidly bourgeois roots make it unpredictably whimsical in many of its decisions, few doubt it will use its three votes to bolster the independence total to 74.
Next are the 13 votes of ICV, a coalition of greens and communists who seem likely to support the claim for a vote on independence although they have been at pains to make clear that their commitment to the referendum should not be interpreted as a commitment to supporting independence. Total so far: 87 out of 135, it would seem, just under two thirds although arguably not a ‘significant majority’.
The final group is the Catalan Socialist Party PSC/ PSOE which finds itself more than somewhat challenged as it tries to come to a coherent decision. Historically split between a Catalan-speaking middle-class element and a more working-class immigrant (within Spain) Castilian speaking group, the party in Madrid has come out unreservedly in favour of federalism though against any meaningful distinctions between these federal regions, a classic political posture of wanting to have your cake and eat it. But countenancing Catalan independence has been unequivocally vetoed by its leader Perez-Rubalcaba.
Locally, the Catalan socialists appear willing to confront the national leader by claiming with equal incoherence to be in favour of the right of the Catalans to hold a referendum on their future though only so long as the electorate guarantees to vote for the status quo. Which does rather call into question the purpose of the exercise. And which makes predicting the final voting posture of the PSC well nigh impossible.
In addition to this strictly constitutional wrangling, the personal stakes are rising by the week. Artur Mas has been seriously weakened by his electoral reverse and remains in self-imposed purdah most of the time. The fact that his only real rival within the party is Jordi Pujol’s son Oriol is for once a bonus for reasons which will become apparent.
The Madrid government has been turning the screws on the Catalan finances and has used the constitutional court to strike down pro tem within two days three different money and tax-raising schemes hatched by the Catalan government, thereby making that government’s economic woes ever more pressing but also leading Mas to threaten Madrid with the inevitable consequences for Spain’s ailing economy of a Catalan default.
Josep Duran i Lleida, the leader of Mas’s twin coalition party UCD, has been caught out badly politically by refusing to resign over an illegal party funding scandal even although he had promised that in such circumstances he would quit. Moreover, his party’s historic animadversion to the ERC, dating back to Spanish civil war pogroms where UCD members at times paid with their lives for being on the wrong side of the revolution, means that the capacity for misunderstanding between CiU and ERC is enormous. In personal terms, the call by the ERC leader for Duran i Lleida to resign didn’t help one whit.
Still more worryingly for those supporting the independence case, the Madrid press has got the bit between the teeth over long-standing allegations of corruption within the higher echelons of CiU. Although the Catalan government-funded tv station TV3 and its radio equivalent are as circumspect as Trappist monks on the matter, barely a day passes without a new lurid headline in a Madrid newspaper or a blunt accusation of systematic instutionalised corruption within the family of the grandfather of Catalan nationalism, Jordi Pujol, the founder of CDC, the senior partner in the CiU coalition. When the paramour of Pujol’s elder son simultaneously accuses the clan heir of domestic violence and of carrying suitcases full of euros to the Andorran banks, the scene is clearly set both for a personal and political battle to the death.
James Scott is a former maths teacher who was born in Glasgow and now lives in a small town in Tarragona Province, Catalonia
