From the New York Times
BARCELONA, Spain — The violent images from Catalonia’s prohibited referendum on independence from Spain will not be forgotten anytime soon. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain now has a legacy that includes gruesome photographs and videos of policemen confiscating ballot boxes, using tear gas on voters and swatting elderly women with batons.
Despite this repression, more than 90 percent of the voters on Sunday — more than two million people — in Catalonia voted to secede from Spain. Far from defusing the crisis, Mr. Rajoy has strengthened the resolve of the independence movement and further polarized the country.
This was not the only option available to the prime minister. In early September, pro-independence parties in Catalonia’s regional Parliament broke their own laws when they bypassed the opposition to pass legislation that would make the referendum’s result binding. If Mr. Rajoy’s intention was to delegitimize the vote, all he had to do was refuse to recognize the result and he and his right-wing Popular Party would most likely have faced little resistance from most of Spain’s political forces.
This would have maintained the deadlock of recent years, but it would also have avoided escalating the conflict. Instead, the use of force has confirmed the referendum’s legitimacy in the eyes of those who participated in it.
At first glance, Mr. Rajoy’s strategy seems counterintuitive. If his intention is to persuade the people of Catalonia to remain in Spain, the violence on Sunday does not make an attractive case. But winning hearts and minds in the region is not his main objective. He is putting his own interests and those of his party ahead of Spain’s stability.
Support for Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party has always been weak in Catalonia, as it has been in the Basque region, where separatist sentiment is also strong. One consequence of the Franco dictatorship’s decades-long repression of Basque and Catalan culture is that today conservative parties in both places can distinguish themselves from the Popular Party by referring to anti-fascist struggle with some credibility. In fact, this has been a crucial factor in bringing about the current crisis.
Opposition to Mr. Rajoy has fueled the Catalan independence movement for years. In July 2012, some eight months into his first term as prime minister, Mr. Rajoy rejected a plan that would have given Catalonia more fiscal autonomy. Before then, the conservative Catalan nationalist party Convergence worked with the Popular Party to push austerity measures through Parliament. But austerity was deeply unpopular — as evidenced by the rise of the “indignados” movement throughout Spain — and Convergence saw the writing on the wall. It jettisoned its alliance with Mr. Rajoy’s party and joined forces with progressive nationalists and the movement for independence.
In this context, the political costs of a heavy-handed approach to Catalonia have been low for Mr. Rajoy. Indeed, he is using the issue to sow division among his rivals. Spain’s federal model and the right to self-determination are extremely divisive issues for the country’s left-wing parties, the traditional center-left Socialist Party and the new, grass-roots Podemos. While the Socialists support a federal model and wanted to avoid a referendum, Podemos backs a legally binding vote on Catalan independence. Mr. Rajoy’s obstinacy capitalizes on this division, weakening the Socialists by forcing them to compete with the Popular Party for hard-line unionist voters.
Podemos and its regional affiliates are well equipped to deal with this deadlock. Their critique of the “regime of 1978” — a term they use to refer to Spain’s current constitutional order — singles out the shortcomings of a Constitution that was written primarily to guarantee a peaceful transition from dictatorship to liberal democracy. The upstart Podemos, whose affiliates have won the past two elections in Catalonia, has called for reforms to the Constitution, and it offers a vision of Spain as a “plurinational state.”
What this actually means is unclear. But as Spain’s territorial crisis deepens, Podemos has acquired a new political centrality that will require it to propose an alternative to the status quo that appeals to both the center-left Socialist Party’s supporters as well as Catalan nationalists.
Whether this is possible after Sunday is anybody’s guess. As the conflict between the Spanish and Catalan governments escalates, those who condemn repression and try to promote dialogue between the two are often criticized for having an artificially equidistant stance. At the same time, however, both sides are so entrenched that they can’t recognize that constitutional reform could solve the problem for them.
Tellingly, both Mr. Rajoy’s government and the independence movement refer to their positions as a defense of democracy. In a speech on Sunday night, Mr. Rajoy referred to democracy as the rule of law, and heaped praise on the police and the judicial system. The Catalan independence movement expresses itself in terms of popular power and the right to self-determination.
These fundamental questions suggest that the implications of Spain’s territorial crisis extend well beyond the country’s borders. What is at stake is whether one constitutional order can guarantee democratic governance among several nations. In this sense, Spain is a microcosm of Europe’s existential crisis.
By fanning the flames of conflict, Mr. Rajoy has shown that he is incapable of reaching a lasting agreement with either the leaders of Catalonia or several of the parties in his own Congress. It is now up to the rest of Spain to respond to the challenge of rebuilding the bridges he has burned, if it is not too late already.
Carlos Delclós (@CarlosDelclos), a sociologist, is the author of “Hope Is a Promise: From the Indignados to the Rise of Podemos in Spain.”
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