The shocking violence in Barcelona on Sunday makes the politics behind Catalonia’s separatist movement even harder to parse. Helmeted police in riot gear disrupted polling places, beat citizens attempting to vote, and left an incredible 893 people injured—all in the name of halting a referendum on Catalonian independence that national laws deemed to be illegal. [...]
Catalan elites, however, have never quite got a slice of the national political pie that corresponds with their economic power. The autonomy written into Spain’s national system means that the region gets considerable say in its own affairs—the regional government, called the Generalitat de Catalunya, has substantial (and sometimes absolute) local jurisdiction in many areas. Still, the lion’s share of national institutional influence has always remained fiercely guarded in Madrid. In times of prosperity, this led to tension, but since the financial crisis of 2008, the post-Franco pact has truly been coming unstuck. With Spain continuing to flounder economically, people are losing faith in the central state’s ability to solve their problems. [...]
This being the 21st century, there’s still more to it than that. The independence push is also a vessel through which Catalonia’s citizens voice their disaffection with wider problems affecting people across Spain, such as falling living standards and appalling youth unemployment. Faced with a vote for change—any change—people have mobilized, although independence has never quite gained majority support: Pre-referendum data from the Generalitat itself showed a mere 41 percent for independence. It’s not entirely coincidental that the movement has grown during the era of Brexit, another referendum that was partly a vehicle for frustrations that lay beyond the question being directly posed to electorates. [...]
It would be extremely wrong to suggest the somewhat murky motivations behind Catalonia’s referendum means that the leaders of Spain’s national government are in some way the good guys. In fact, the central government has also been accused of using the separatist debate to distract voters from other problems. It has failed to take advantage of numerous opportunities to defuse the situation, in part because anti-Catalan saber-rattling is catnip to a section of its base.
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