The Community Spirit in Catalan Demonstrations

With the Spanish government using all means at their disposal to stop the Catalans from voting on a referendum that the Spanish say is very illegal, the Catalans continue to protest and demonstrate for democracy and freedom.  They do it peacefully, sometimes with humor, and especially in these last few days, with a great sense of community spirit.

While the big demonstrations draw crowds of tens of thousands to a million or more people, this week, just days before the scheduled vote on Sunday, the demonstrations in support of the referendum (that many say is perfectly legal, but in any case, in what kind of democracy is voting illegal?) have been small in scale and very large in terms of the community spirit they show.

When Spain sent in hundreds of their national police to printing presses and small town newspapers where the police entered and seized supposed referendum materials (some of those searches and seizures done without benefit of court order) the Catalans protested peacefully, singing and placing carnations on the police cars.

When Spain obtained three large ships to house the thousands of national police that were being sent from all over Spain and two docked in Barcelona while the third docked in Tarragona, the stevedores announced that they would not service those “ships of repression.”

When Spain realized that it was undignified to have Looney Tunes characters painted bigger than life on the sides of one of the ships destined to house the national police, someone decided to cover Tweety, Sylvester, Daffy, and the Tasmanian Devil with large tarps.

This caused the Catalans to start a campaign to Free Piolin (Free Tweety) and Tweety was incorporated into the visual imagery of the right to vote campaign.  Never mind that by the next day, the tarps had fallen or blown or were taken off and Tweety was once again free.

What we’ve had this week has been, among other things,

1.  High school and university students calling a strike on Friday (no school was held) and holding informative sessions and demonstrations in support of the right to vote.

2.  On Thursday, more than 300 firefighters came to Barcelona from all over Catalonia, to hold their own demonstration and hang a giant poster at the history museum in support of the referendum and the right to vote.

3.  Also on Thursday, more than 700 school teachers, principals, and administrators came to Barcelona, to the Palau de la Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government, to symbolically give the keys of their schools to the President of the Generalitat, making those schools available for the voting on Sunday.  Those schools are the usual sites of the polling stations in all elections and they did this under threat of prosecution by the Spanish government.

4.  Then, on Friday, several thousand farmers drove their tractors from the countryside throughout Catalunya, causing all sorts of slowdowns on highways and city streets, as their tratorcades came to the largest city in their area -- Lleida, Girona, Tarragona, or Barcelona, to show their support for the referendum and their right to vote.

5.  And finally, starting Friday afternoon and continuing until the polls open on Sunday morning at 8 am, there has been an organized effort to keep the schools open.  This involves people actively occupying hundreds of public schools that will serve as polling stations on Sunday.  Over 60,000 people are participating in this marathon initiative that is being carried out throughout Catalonia by parents and other members of each of the communities where the schools are located.  It was done to prevent the police from blocking entry between Friday afternoon when the schools closed and Sunday morning when they are supposed to be opened to people who come to vote.  These groups have many activities planned for adults and children, and many brought sleeping bags to spend Friday and Saturday night there.  They’ve had food brought in by the box to feed everyone, and as in all these demonstrations, there is a festive spirit and a strong sense of community.

Photo and image credits: all found on the internet

One Vote Down, One to Go

It seemed a very long time coming and now, just a week later, it seems that it happened months ago.  I suppose that is because of all the pent up emotions.  Every day we were reading the newspapers and watching the news for the latest development: What obstacle will they put next?  Will the police or army block the entrances to the polling stations?  Will people be arrested?  With all the obstacles and threats, can there be a decent result?  Will it actually happen at all?

Last Sunday, in spite of all that the Spanish government had to throw in their path, 2,236,806 Catalans went to vote on a referendum that if not legal and binding, at least gave them the chance to voice their opinion on paper ballots – a basic democratic right.  That opinion was 80% in favor of independence from Spain. 

Because the Spanish government would not agree to a legal and binding referendum, the Catalan government made plans for a legal but non-binding consultation.  But the Spanish government was determined not to let the Catalans vote under any circumstances, and they filed a complaint with the Spanish Constitutional Court.  The Court, upon agreeing to review the complaint, suspended the consultation and any preparations pertaining to it. 

Artur Mas, the President of the Catalan government, then announced that the vote would go ahead, but not under the Catalan law under which the original consultation had been planned, but as an informal voter participation that would be run by volunteers so as not to put public employees at risk in disobeying the court suspension and it would use facilities owned by the Catalan government so as not to put city hall officials at risk either. 

He put out a call for volunteers, saying that 20,000 would be needed; within two days he had over 40,000.  Several hundred city halls added to the available facilities by donating their own facilities for use that day. 

This meant that going to vote was an act of civil disobedience.  The Spanish government was too circumspect to send in the army (as some wanted), but they had alternative troops: threats, legal intimidation, trying to discredit or eliminate those who are active and important to the movement, and finally, on the day, the attempted sabotage of the computer and phone systems of the Catalan government and the grassroots citizen group that was organizing the event (it is not yet determined who was behind that and will be interesting to find out – but how many people could afford the more than 100,000 euros that the professionally handled sabotage would have cost?  I wonder if it was taxpayers’ money…).

Over 2 million people went to vote on 9 November.  There was a campaign by the grassroots organizing group that showed a famous person holding the photo of an important person, now deceased, but who would have wanted to go to the polls to vote.  The Madrid press made fun of the campaign saying that dead people were going to vote. 

My friend Trini said that she was going to vote for her father, who died about a year ago and who would have wanted to vote Yes.  My Catalan teacher told me she cried as she left the polling station, thinking of her grandfather who had gone into exile after the Civil War.  She was voting for him.  Pep Guardiola, the football coach, flew in from Munich to vote.  People flew in from much farther away too.  They could have found polling stations closer to where they were, there were 14 scattered around the world, but they wanted to come here and be with their friends and family and the rest of their community when they went to the polls.  It was a little like Thanksgiving but without the turkey.  Because they could not use the usual polling places, there were fewer of them and the lines to vote were longer.  But people didn’t mind and there was a good atmosphere. 

The two major political parties in Spain had been against any vote.  The PP party did everything it could to prevent it; the Socialists told their followers not to vote because it was illegal.

The day after the vote the Spanish government began their cynical campaign of belittling the results – of belittling the Catalan people and what, against all odds, they had just achieved.  This was not a referendum, not even a consultation – it was a joke. It was not democratic.   It did not have all the required legal guarantees; not many people went to vote; if more had gone the No vote would have been bigger – would have been the majority, etc. 

This was not a referendum because the Spanish government would not agree to one and it did not have all the legal guarantees of a government-run vote because the Spanish government made that illegal by sending it to court.  If they really wanted to know how many would vote Yes and how many No, all they had to do is allow a legal vote, campaign for No, and encourage people to go and vote -- like Britain did with Scotland. 

As exciting and emotional as all this was, the saga is not over yet.  Now we are waiting to see if criminal charges will be brought against Catalan President Mas or anyone else involved with the organization of last week's voting.

President Mas will probably be calling for early Catalan parliamentary elections that will be a plebiscite where either banded together in groups or independently, the political parties will run on a single issue – that of independence – yes or no.  That will be the real vote, in lieu of a referendum, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later.  With all the dancing around and musical chairs going on – which party will team up with which, or will they team up at all? -- the weeks or months leading up to it promise to be yet another emotional challenge.

These Are The Times That Try Catalan Souls

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.

The Catalan left and right wing works together

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.

The daily unfolding of this political spectacle has kept me engaged.  I’ve been off my regular TV diet, favoring afternoon AND evening news and anything that gets announced in between on the internet.  There is a peaceful revolution going on in Catalunya where the people are determined to exercise their democratic right.

No Vote in Spain

This has been a very animated week here in Catalunya.  As the day nears for the vote on a referendum to decide whether or not Catalans want to remain part of Spain, the pace of the moves on both sides quickens and intensifies.  You might think that “both sides” refers to both sides of the question to be voted.  And you would be wrong.  “Both sides” refers to the Catalan government that is committed to its citizens to hold the vote on one side, and the Spanish government that is committed to blocking it on the other.  Because Spain is supposedly a modern (western!) country and part of the European Union, one might wonder why voting would be an issue.  In order to be admitted to the EU a country has to demonstrate that it is a democracy, and Spain managed to be accepted.  Now that it is a member, the EU doesn’t really want to be bothered about whether or not it is democratic and whether or not it prohibits its citizens from voting and telling their elected representatives unequivocally what they want.

The last few days went like this.  On 19 September, a week after 1.8 million people demonstrated in Barcelona saying they wanted to vote, the Catalan parliament approved a law that allowed for the people to be “consulted” and called for the consultation to be held on 9 November.  It was passed by the overwhelming majority of 106 to 28.  A consultation differs from a referendum in that it does not become a law (as would a proposition voted on an American state ballot).  It tells the government (the Catalan government) what the voters want in reference to a subject of importance to them.  It is then up to the government to negotiate if necessary and to implement their wish.

In its concept, it is more democratic than the usual procedure of voting for a person (here you vote for a party) and hoping that the person or party will do what was promised in a campaign.  When you vote in a consultation, you are being consulted by your government; you are telling all your representatives exactly what you do or do not want them to do on a specific issue. 

Oriol Junkeras (ERC), representing the Catalan left
and Artur Mas (CiU) representing the Catalan right:
Two unlikely allies who have set their ideological
differences aside to work for a common goal

On Saturday 29 September Artur Mas, President of the Generalitat of Catalunya, signed the Law of Consultations.

On Sunday 30 September Spanish President Rajoy met with his cabinet, not to discuss how they might discuss this crisis with the Catalan government, but to take steps to block the Consultation.

The complaint, saying that the Law of Consultations was unconstitutional, was filed with the Spanish Constitutional Court on Monday morning.  Not scheduled to meet, the members of the Court flew to their chambers, held a special emergency meeting, and on Monday afternoon the Court agreed to consider it and that immediately suspended the new Catalan Law of Consultations.

Given the great speed by which these high-level bodies met and acted whereas this type of thing usually takes weeks or months to be looked at by the Court, President Mas made the comment that it was all done at supersonic speed.  One might also wonder how it was that the Court, that had never been called to a meeting so quickly, agreed to meet that same day.  It looks to some as if the Constitutional Court simply takes its orders from the Spanish government.  This could be substantiated by the fact that the Court’s President, Francisco Perez de los Cabos, was a member of the governing party (PP) while he was a judge (he later quit his party membership) while he was a judge, even though the Spanish Constitution forbids it.  He was not dismissed.  Why would the PP want to dismiss one of their own?

On Tuesday, the Catalan government temporarily suspended preparations for the Consultation, the issue to be discussed by the political parties in favor of holding the Consultation later in the week. 

On Wednesday, the Catalan government filed an appeal to the Constitutional Court requesting that the suspension be lifted.

It is not surprising that, although it is already Friday, there has been no response from the Court.   In fact, it isn’t clear when they will meet to consider this appeal.  Some things do not happen at supersonic speed.

After writing and posting this, I read a special announcement.  The Catalan political parties that support the right to vote finished their 7-hour meeting.  They include CIU, the Catalan right wing, ERC, the Catalan left wing, the Greens, and CUP the radicals (for lack of a better definition -- they continue to baffle me).  They pretty much cover the Catalan political spectrum (minus the socialists who don't seem to think that voting is a fundamental right in a democracy) and have all agreed that they will go ahead with the Consultation.  They say that voting is a basic democratic right and neither the central government in Madrid nor the Constitutional Court has the right to prohibit it.  

Further reading:
From the Harvard Political Review: http://harvardpolitics.com/world/catalonia-contention/ 

OpEd from the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-cole-catalonia-independence-20141001-story.html

Right To Vote

Catalunya continues to move forward, getting closer to holding a referendum and probably closer to their independence.  Yesterday was a big day.  Yesterday four of the six political parties represented in the Catalan Parliament came to an agreement on the date that the referendum will be held and the questions that the voters will be asked to respond to.  Artur Mas, President of Catalunya, made the announcement at mid-day, accompanied by representatives from all four parties.  The excitement, watching the announcement live on TV, made eating lunch difficult.

The date will be 9 November 2014.  This is later than many people would like, but was agreed upon for logistical reasons.

The ballot will contain two questions:

(1)  Do you want Catalunya to become a state?  Yes or No
If the response is Yes, then
(2)  Do you want that state to be independent?  Yes or No

What many people hoped for was the simpler question, Do you want Catalunya to become an independent state?  But there are those who want to change the structure of Spain and make it a federal system much like the United States of America.  With the two part question, those who want a state but do not want that state to be independent, can say so.

The four political parties that reached this agreement yesterday are of varied political ideologies.  The CiU represents the Catalan right wing.  It is a party that historically represents the interests of the bourgeoisie and business and is the party currently in power in Catalunya.  Near the other end of the Catalan political spectrum is the ERC, the Catalan left wing.  They historically represent social and worker interests and Catalan independence.  ICV is the Green party although they tend to be equally concerned with social issues.  And finally CUP, a newcomer to the Parliament with a very small representation.  To be honest, I don’t really know how to define them.  They seem to be some mixture of leftist and anarchist and represent the anti-establishment sector.  When they first showed up to take their seats in Parliament after being elected, they were reprimanded for wearing t-shirts to the august chamber.  They still wear t-shirts.

 

There are two other parties in the Catalan Parliament, PPC and Ciutadans.  PPC is the Catalan section of the national PP party, a far right party that still celebrates elements of the Franco dictatorship and currently holds the absolute majority in the Spanish Congress.  Ciutadans is another, albeit very small, right wing party.  I’ve been told that they are not right wing, but from all I hear them say, I don’t see any difference between what these two parties have to say except that the Catalan PP representatives usually say it in Catalan and the Ciutadans usually say it in Spanish.

That the four parties mentioned above, CiU, ERC, ICV, and CUP, spanning almost the complete political spectrum, could come to this agreement after two days of meetings and negotiations, is nothing short of amazing.  It happened because in spite of their differences, they are all determined that Catalans should be given the chance to vote and determine their own future.  Not all of these politicians will vote Yes, Yes.  Some are not in favor of independence.  But they all think that in a democracy, a public that has clamored for a referendum (polls say that 84% of Catalans want to vote), should be able to vote on one. 

 

 

This should serve as an example to American politicians.  If you want things to work, if you want your country to keep moving forward, and if you want to do your job properly and get things done, you need to compromise.  All four of those parties compromised on the date, or the question to be asked, or both.  Some wanted the date to be months earlier.  Some wanted only one question asking only about independence.

It took less than 30 minutes for the Spanish President to respond.  Catalunya will be prevented from holding a referendum.  He maintains that a referendum is unconstitutional.

But the fact is, if a democratically elected body such as the Catalan Parliament presents a formal request that the authority to conduct a referendum be given to Catalunya (a similar mechanism by which Britain gave Scotland the authority to hold theirs), because their citizens want to vote, it should be given.  Legal experts say that the constitution allows for this.  If they are wrong, then the constitution could also be changed.  The US constitution has already acquired 27 Amendments from the time it was first written.  Constitutions are not carved in stone.  Laws should serve the people, not oppress them.   

In some parts of the US it used to be illegal for a black to sit in a bus if a white person was standing.  In Germany Jews had to wear black armbands with yellow stars that identified them as Jews.  In South Africa there was apartheid.  In America owning slaves was legal.  Not all laws are good.  A law that doesn’t allow people to vote is not appropriate in a democracy.

So far, word is that most democratic countries have taken notice of Spain’s intransigency.  I also heard that the US government response was that all Spaniards should vote on such a referendum.  If true, I find that deeply disappointing.  Did America ask the English to vote on whether or not Americans were to become independent?

We are all eagerly waiting to see what will happen next.

Catalans Want to Vote

The Catalan Parliament is working to provide its citizens with a referendum they can vote on in 2014 to say Yes or No to the question of whether Catalunya should be an independent state.  As usual, the PP party of Catalunya is opposed to a referendum because, it says, it is illegal.  But the PP is a small, minority party in Catalunya and probably yet another reason why many Catalans don't want to be part of Spain where the PP party holds an absolute majority in the Spanish Parliament.  The rest seem to think that voting is what people do in a democracy. 

There are questions within the Parliament about whether there shouldn't be more than one question on the future referendum.  But I think the public wants it to be the simple question or whether or not Catalunya should remain part of Spain or gain its independence.  That is what the two huge grassroots demonstrations -- one with 1.5 million people in 2012 and the other recently with 1.6 million in the Via Catalana human chain -- were about.

It seems to me that if Catalans voted on such a referendum and the No vote won, then that would be the time to consider other options with the aim of changing the system to give Catalunya more autonomy within the framework of the Spanish state.  Oh, excuse me; Spain is a Kingdom.  Did you know that?  The problem with other options, of course, is that the Spanish Parliament would have to approved any of those, and as witnessed during the last few years with every proposal brought from the Catalan Parliament to the Spanish government, the response has always been No.  Not only No, but almost every week there is a motion from Madrid to increaseinly curtail the autonomy that Catalunya enjoys.  Thus, there is little reason to think it would suddenly change it's course.

The President of the Generalitat (President of Catalunya, something like a governor of one of the United States), Artur Mas, is the head of the CiU party, a conservative Catalan party.  In spite of the fact that neither he nor his party began this movement for independence, he (and most of his party) has responded to what he sees as the will of the people.  He has become the political leader that is working from all ends to meet the objective of a referendum and then, following the expected outcome, lead the country to a declaration of independence. 

Some on the left don't trust him because his party is right wing, and because Mas and CiU are said to only have jumped on the bandwagon once they saw the lay of the land.  But I think that we are not here to give points to who started this movement.  And it is good enough if a political leader can see what the people want and respond appropriately, even if it wasn't his idea.  In fact, I think someone like that deserves some credit.  We all know who started this movement -- Carme Forcadell -- and she will be long remembered in Catalan history.  But so will Artur Mas because with his intelligence, his diplomatic skills, and his willingness to partner up with Oriol Junkeras of the Esquerra Republicana -- the left wing party at the other end of the spectrum from that of Artur Mas -- he will be the one to make it happen.

But then, only time will tell and each day brings a little bit of news.  This is a very exciting time to be living here.

Photo credit: my pal, Trini Gonzalez