The answer wasn’t too difficult to find. First, there was the “great recession” of 2008-2014 which led to record high rates of unemployment, in particular among young people (Spain’s unemployment rate was twice the eurozone average in 2012, with a staggering 57.9% of youth unemployment in 2014). Then, there were the politicians eager to tap into the “pool of rage” created by the unprecedented economic crisis to further their own agendas. Chief among these was Artur Mas, former President of the Government of Catalonia (2010-2015) and the former leader of the centre-right Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), who succumbed to intraparty pressures in 2012 and decided to break with the traditional – middle-of-the-road – approach of his predecessor Jordi Pujol to carry the banner of independentism, till then brandished by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (The Republican Left of Catalonia) and other groups; and Mariano Rajoy, the notorious Prime Minister of Spain between 2011-2018 whose centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party) initiated the process which ended with the amendment of the 2006 Estatut on Catalonia’s autonomy by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2010, after it was approved by both the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan people in a referendum – thereby partially crushing Catalonia’s hopes for more self-rule. [...]
Yet facts can help only so much when it comes to understanding the current crisis in Catalonia where reality is bifurcated, with few, if any, points of contact between the opposing secessionist and unionist visions. In this bifurcated world, one’s “independence referendum” is another’s “illegal consultation” just as one’s “political prisoner” is another’s “imprisoned politician”. But truth is not the only casualty of this battle of realities. Another important casualty is rule of law, the sine qua non of any democracy. After voicing his concerns on la sentencia, or the final ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court on independentist leaders, Xavier Arbós, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona told me, “The Spanish government acted as if the only thing that exists is the law whereas the Catalan government acted as if the law didn’t exist.” [...]
First, independence means different things to different people. According to the latest barometer of the Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies, only 34.5% of the population believes that Catalonia should be an independent state – as opposed to 27% who would want Catalonia to remain as an autonomous community in Spain (status quo). But there are also those who believe that Catalonia should be a state within a federal Spain (24.5%), thereby bringing the total percentage of people who would like to see a change in the existing state of affairs to 59%.
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