Some politicians, commentators and pundits have tried to
make it complicated, but it isn’t. In a
democracy people can vote. They can’t be
limited as to what they can vote on. The government of a democracy can’t do as
China does, to say what you can vote on or what list you must choose from.
The Catalans are determined to vote. The more Spain tries to block them, the more
determined they are. I think at this point in time, Catalunya is lucky to have
the president it has. President Mas isn’t
interested in putting on a show or engaging in civil disobedience that the media
would probably enjoy. He promised he
would provide voting boxes and ballots, and he has found a way to do that.
Spain wouldn’t allow a referendum. A referendum is a vote that is binding, so
that if, for instance the public voted yes, they wanted to separate from Spain,
that would put in motion the negotiations between the Catalan and the Spanish
governments to work out the terms of the separation. That is what would have happened with
Scotland and Great Britain if the Scots had voted yes. But they didn’t. So never mind.
Being denied a referendum, at the end of September, the
Catalan Parliament passed a law call La Llei de Consultes no referendaries (Law of
Consultations). This gave the Catalan
government the power to call for a “consulta no vinculada i no referendaria” a
non-binding consultation – not a referendum -- when it thought necessary to
poll the public on matters that concern them. They had resorted to this
language and this law because of the ban on a referendum by the Spanish
government.
Having the Law of Consultations in place, on Saturday 27
September, President Mas signed a decree calling for a non-binding consultation
to be held on 9 November 2014 and specifying the question that would be voted
on, as had been agreed upon by the Catalan parliament.
The following day, 29 September (a Sunday – normally a day
to rest and enjoy a paella) the Spanish council of ministers met to impugn the
Catalan law of consultations. Their
impugnation was delivered to the Spanish Constitutional Court on Monday. In an unprecedented move, the Court convened
that same day (at lightning speed -- it would normally take months) and agreed
to take it under consideration. That
automatically meant the law and the decree were suspended.
Then, on 13 October, President Mas announced that there
would indeed be a consultation on 9 November.
This would not be the same consultation called for by the decree. He called it a participatory process and said
it was based on another legal framework, one that he did not specify but said
already existed.
This put the Catalan political parties into a tizzy. Four of them (with a majority in the Catalan
parliament) had agreed on the question and the date. They had passed the law of consultations, and
they had agreed on the decree. Now all
of a sudden, President Mas came out with a new game to play.
The reason he did this was that if they went ahead with the
consultation as originally planned, it would mean disobeying the suspension
imposed by the Constitutional Court. It
would not only be the politicians who would be disobeying, it would be all the
public employees who organized the vote – those who prepared the eligible
voters lists, those who set up the physical spaces, those who counted the
votes, etc . Any government employee who
worked in any way on the consultation could be charged with illegal activity by
the Spanish state.
At first the parties were in an uproar because what they had all
agreed upon had been changed. One of
them even broke down during a radio interview.
He said it was stress and fatigue, but I personally think that he, more
than any of the others, wishes for the independence of Catalunya and wants it
to happen sooner rather than later.
But after just a few days, they have reassembled, if not as
strongly together as before, nevertheless they have all come out in support of
the current set up for the new participatory process. All but the Greens. Maybe today or tomorrow they will issue a
statement otherwise, but so far the leaders have said that they will not go to
vote on 9 November. Instead they will
hold demonstrations of protest and they encourage the public to attend.
This is one of the most disappointing items that has come
out of all this drama. The only thing
that counts is people voting. There have
already been several demonstrations – one of over a million, a second of over
1.5 million, and the most recent of 1.8 million. Now what the Catalan political leaders need
to see, what the Spanish government needs to see, and what the world needs to
see is how many people will go to vote (or participate) and what percentage
will vote for independence. Having
another demonstration will only detract from the issue at hand which is voting.
One of the most interesting and encouraging things in all of
this process is that those four Catalan political parties have been able, up to
now, to put their political differences aside to work for a common goal – the right
to vote, and they are doing so because of the expressed desires of the Catalan
public – left and right. Those parties
span the political spectrum and include CiU the Catalan right/business-oriented
wing (the party of President Mas); ICV the Greens; ERC, the Catalan left
(that has always been pro-independence), and the CUP, a small, radical
left-wing independentist party.
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| The Catalan left and right wing works together |
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| Working together, a wide spectrum of Catalan political parties agreed on the Law of Consultations |
People really want to have this vote. President Mas called for volunteers to do the
work so as not to put public employees in legal
jeopardy. He asked for 20,000
volunteers. Within four days over 30,000 signed up.
President Mas maintains that the consultation as originally
decreed was non-binding and this consultation/participatory process is the
essentially the same. Instead of lists
of eligible voters at the polls, which is the usual procedure in Spain, each
person will have to show their I.D. (Spain has national picture I.D. cards). The tables will be manned by volunteers and the
data from the I.D. card will be cross-checked with census data.
How the votes will be collected and counted and who will be
there to ensure that there is no corruption in the process has not been
disclosed. President Mas is playing this
new game with his cards held very close to his chest. He is determined that there is no loophole
through which the Spanish government can find something to denounce. Spanish President Rajoy today did indeed
announce that his government is looking to see if this new participatory
process, which he said is just a cover-up for a referendum and is
anti-democratic, can be considered illegal and sent to the Constitutional
Court. But President Mas says that since
there is no published law and no official decree, (and since the court is a
constitutional and not a criminal court), there is nothing concrete that the Constitutional
Court can base a judgment on.
