Harsh sentences mean Catalan crisis will intensify

The sentencing today of 12 Catalan separatist leaders by Spain’s Supreme Court to a total of over 100 years in prison has triggered protests in Spain and beyond. With it comes the prospect of many more in the days ahead – not least in Catalonia itself – Spain’s richest region, where separatist sympathisers have threatened mass disruption of the rail network, roads and telecommunications.

The region’s former vice-president Oriol Junqueras has been sentenced to 13 years for sedition and misuse of public funds. The public prosecutor had asked for the maximum tariff of 25 years for rebellion under the constitution of 1978.

The constitution of 1978, brought in a year after the first democratic national election since the end of the dictatorship of General Franco, who died in 1975, declares “the undivided unity of the Spanish nation.” Regions were to be given local powers as “Autonomies”, but there was to be no recourse to referendum to gain regional independence. This was clearly aimed at separatists in the Basque country and Catalonia, and regions with strong local identities such as Andalusia, Valencia and the Balearics.

The handling of Catalan separatism by Madrid is a story that has run for centuries, but in recent times it has read like a cautionary tale of chucking oil on troubled water, then setting light to it. Since 1975, there has always been a suspicion from the Catalan end about the unhealthy relationship between the courts, the Constitutional Court especially, and politics in Madrid.

In this vein, Carlos Puigdemont, the former President of the Catalan region who is now in exile to escape trial, declared: “100 years in total are an atrocity. It is time to react like never before – for the future of our sons and daughters. For democracy. For Europe. For Catalonia.”

In Madrid, a leading lieutenant of the prime minister Pedro Sanchez, and fellow PSOE Socialist Jose Luis Ablos said, “the sentences must be carried out and complied with.” There are growing hints that Madrid may invoke article 155 of the constitution to impose direct rule in Catalonia to ensure public order and services – a sure-fire guarantee of more demonstrations and disruption by separatists.

The roots of separatism are complex. Catalan language and culture are distinct, and evolved in a different direction from the rest of the peninsula from the end of the Roman Empire. The Catalan language is part of a group of languages – Romance languages, orginating from Latin – close to Provencal and Occitan. The culture is Mediterranean, and was once a part of a medieval empire that embraced parts of Greece and the Balearics. Catalan is still spoken in Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Alghero in north west Sardinia.

After Franco’s forces took Barcelona, then hosting about a third of a million refugees, at the end of the Civil War in 1939, Catalan was banned as an official language. Its use in public was prohibited. Thanks to patronage by the dynamic Catalan diaspora, especially in Latin America, and the British government, which sponsored three university readerships in Catalan, the language, literature and historiography of Catalonia continued to flourish.

The return to democracy in 1975, and with it considerable autonomy to the restored government or Generalitat of Catalonia, brought a boom time, one crowned by the 1992 Barcelona Olympics – which remains the most commercially the most successful olympics to date.

Catalonia has been long established as the heart of industry in Spain, the big earner. It was calculated in 2014 that Catalans contributed more than €10 billion to central government funds than they got in return. But by 2014, after years of austerity, the cause of greater autonomy, separatism even, had been reignited.

Much of the present crisis turns on the extra powers of the devolved government won by the Catalans as a part of new autonomy provisions approved by Madrid in 2006. After a lengthy appeal, some of the new powers were declared illegal by the Constitutional Court in 2010. By then the Spanish prime minister was the centre-right Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy, a man implacably opposed to conciliation with the Catalans until he left office last year. As implacable was his predecessor as Popular Party Jose Maria Aznar, a neo-Falangist in his youth. One of the shrewdest diplomats in Madrid at the time confided to me that he saw Aznar as the real architect of the PP’s anti-Catalan sentiments and crackdowns.

In 2014 the Catalan government organized a non-binding, “informal” referendum on independence. Needless to say, though, on a questionable sample and turnout, the pro-independence campaign won.

After a series of strikes, sit-downs and protests, the regional government under Carlos Puigdemont organized a formal independence referendum for 2017. By this time the opposition of national parties and local movements of the “Ciutadans” (citizens) was better organized. They charged that the Catalan separatists, which drew support from both left and right, were “neither inclusive, nor progressive.” Catalan culture was elitist and snobbish, some claimed, like the former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, a native Andalusian.

On 1st October  2017, some 2.3 million Catalans turned out – around 43% of all eligible voters, and 90% voted to split with Spain. On 16th October, two separatist party leaders were arrested. On 27th October, 70 out of 135 members of the Catalan regional assembly voted to recognise the referendum result. Immediately Mariano Rajoy ordered direct rule under article 155 of the constitution. The president of the region Carlos Puigdemont fled to Belgium, where he has remained. His deputy, Oriol Junqueras, was charged a week later with rebellion, sedition and misappropriation of public funds. He has just been sentenced to 13 years.

The whole sorry story is far from over. It is an object lesson in how not to run a federal dialogue with communities and regions. The EU in Brussels has been of little or no help; typically, there are too many vested interests, inhibiting any bold, imaginative or even productive thinking, let alone action. After all, it can always be handed off as an exclusively a sovereign matter for the Madrid government alone. Even so, distinct cultural and ethnic groups across Europe from the Occitans to the Fries, the Lombards, Sardinians and Sicilians to the Bretons or Szekelys in Transylvania must be concerned for their customs, rights and identities. Less and less in the ‘ever-closer Union’, it seems, is there space for such regions and communities.

Catalonia today has a population of about 7.5m. Its success in industry, design, culture and art has made it a place of immigration and emigration, a truly global brand. Officially, some 46% are Spanish speakers and 37% Catalan speakers – with 12% using both languages on a regular daily basis.

Catalan identity is strong, as even the national prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, seems to recognize. But in the Madrid parliament, the Cortes, he has to contend with a chorus of harsher voices form harsher times – particularly the Popular Party, whose spokesman has warned that “Sanchez must affirm now that he will not pardon those convicted.”

On the other hand, Barcelona FC, one of the world’s most successful football clubs, and the Catalan Football Federation have condemned the Supreme Court’s decision and called for “dialogue and negotiation.”

Pablo Iglesias, the charismatic leader of the hugely successful grassroots party Podemos has remarked that the sentences of rebellion seemed odd as no violence was involved. “Beyond the strictly legal debates,” he added in stern terms, “this sentence will go down in the history of Spain as a symbol of how not to deal with political conflict in a democracy.”