Unlike Puigdemont and his successor, Quim Torra, the incumbent president has opted to tone down the rhetoric. Sitting in a wood-panelled room, Aragonès chooses his words carefully. In the grand medieval surroundings of the Palau de Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government, Aragonès defends his party’s decision to share the negotiating table with the socialist government of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, despite repeated criticism from the other two pro-independence parties. In last year’s regional election, pro-independence parties won an overall majority of the popular vote for the first time – 51% – but the party that took the biggest share of the vote was the Catalan branch of the unionist Catalan Socialist party (PSC), led by the former Spanish health minister Salvador Illa.Īragonès eventually became president but with only grudging support from his Junts coalition partners. The three share the common goal of Catalan independence – but little else. Personality clashes and ever-widening splits on the best way forward have riven the Catalan government and the region’s three pro-independence parties: Aragonès’s Catalan Republican Left party (ERC) Puigdemont’s centre-right Together for Catalonia party (Junts) and the hard-left Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP). Others point out that almost a fifth of the region’s population is made up of immigrants who are not eligible to vote in regional or general elections, while in Barcelona those born abroad comprise nearly 25% of the population. There’s a part of the independence movement that doesn’t agree with this process of negotiation but I believe it’s necessary Pere Aragonès, president According to a survey conducted this summer by the same centre, 52% of Catalans now oppose independence, while 41% are in favour. At the height of the crisis in October 2017, a survey by the Catalan government’s Centre for Opinion Studies found that 48.7% of Catalans supported independence, while 43.6% did not. What they comprehensively and consistently failed to do, however, was listen to the majority of Catalans who oppose independence.Īs pro-independence Catalan MPs voted to proclaim independence on 27 October 2017, one centre-right local lawmaker turned to Puigdemont and asked: “How can you imagine you can impose independence like this without a majority in favour … and with this simulacrum of a referendum?”įive years on, the question of validity still hangs in the autumn air. To avoid arrest, Puigdemont fled to Belgium – where he remains to this day – while other pro-independence figures stayed behind to face the consequences, which, for nine of them, included prison.Īlthough Puigdemont and his lieutenants proved unable to deliver the new republic, they did succeed in attracting the world’s attention and forcing the issue to the top of Spain’s political agenda. Hence the fleeting joy 26 days later when secessionist Catalan MPs voted to establish an independent republic – fleeting because it prompted Rajoy’s government to sack Puigdemont and his cabinet, assume direct control of Catalonia and order a fresh regional election.įormer Catalan president Carles Puigdemont after a hearing at the justice court in Belgium, where he has been living in exile since 2017. The sole enemy back then was the Spanish state, as embodied by the conservative government of former prime minister Mariano Rajoy, which insisted the referendum would never take place, and by the thousands of Spanish police officers, whose heavy-handed and violent attempts to stop the vote ended up on newspaper front pages around the world the following day.įor longstanding independentistas, and indeed for many of the less convinced, the police’s raiding of polling stations, beating of voters and firing of rubber bullets was unequivocal proof of the need to break away. There were no such complaints on 1 October 2017, when Catalonia’s then president, Carles Puigdemont, defied Spain’s government and courts by staging the unilateral referendum. There’s no point negotiating with Madrid – we have to fight this ourselves and we will.” Montse Planas, who had come to the Diada from the village of Caldes de Montbui, an hour’s drive north of the Catalan capital, said she felt let down by politicians in Catalonia and Madrid. Aragonès was notably absent from the Diada march organised by the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), the powerful and influential grassroots group that has pushed relentlessly for independence in recent years. Much of the anger of hardcore independentistas is focused on the Catalan regional president, Pere Aragonès, for his willingness to find a negotiated solution to the political impasse. Spanish police clash with pro-independence supporters of Catalonia’s referendum in October 2017.
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