Catalan Independence Movement Rejuvenated After Spanish Elections
By Lilac Carr, BA Politics and International Relations
Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party in Spain, made an incendiary call for his supporters to have ‘‘No calm or tolerance in the face of the coup”
After months of negotiating following an inconclusive snap election, Spain is facing massive protests over the controversial Catalan amnesty deal that led to the incumbent Prime Minister’s re-election.
The Catalan independence party, Junts per Catalunya, acted as the kingmakers in both the negotiations and the Spanish parliament. This marks a defining turn in the Catalan independence movement as Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez enters another term in office.
The centre-left socialist prime minister Sanchez, who led a coalition government between his Socialist party Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party or PSOE and the left-wing Podemos, called a snap election in July. Polls suggested his party would lose a significant number of seats as well as a surge in polls for the far-right party Vox.
These elections instead resulted in a hung parliament in which neither the right-wing parties nor the incumbent coalition had enough seats for a majority in parliament. This left the Catalan independence party, Junts per Catalunya, as the kingmakers in any prime ministerial negotiations.
A tense period of negotiations followed. The centre-right Popular Party (Partido Popular in Spanish), or PP, negotiated first as the largest party in parliament but failed to reach a deal with Junts per Catalunya, who demanded amnesty for political figures involved in the Catalan independence referendum in 2017, including for the political leaders arrested by the Spanish government arrested. These events led to the self-imposed exile of Junts per Catalunya’s leader and former President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, in Belgium in 2017.
PP refused Junts’ conditions, with both right-wing parties, especially the ultranationalist Vox party, strongly against any form of amnesty deal or concessions to the Catalan independence movement.
Sanchez’s socialist party was given the chance to negotiate, and though the party also opposed any referendum on Catalan independence, an amnesty deal was ultimately agreed upon and Junts voted in favour of Sanchez’s re-election as Prime Minister on 16 November, with an overall vote of 179 to 171.
This means that Sanchez’s second term will be under a minority coalition between the Socialists and Sumar, a left-wing electoral alliance including the Socialists’ former coalition partner Podemos.
The amnesty deal and re-election of Sanchez as prime minister was followed by an explosive protest of around 170,000 people in Madrid who opposed the amnesty deal. Some of those who attended included hard-right American political commentator Tucker Carlson and the leaders of PP and Vox.
Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party, made an incendiary call for his supporters to have ‘‘No calm or tolerance in the face of the coup,” referring to the Spanish parliament’s democratic re-election of Sanchez as Prime Minister following the amnesty deal, and for “Total and permanent mobilisation.” For 15 nights following the deal, both before and after this demonstration, protestors also gathered outside the headquarters of PSOE. These protestors included members of Vox as well as neo-nazi groups, and on multiple occasions, violence broke out between protestors and police.
Several former military officers and generals were also found to have made death threats against socialist and Catalan independence politicians, discussing the shooting of Catalan civilians, their support for a military coup, and praising former fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco. Several of these officers also wrote a letter against the current government to the King of Spain. The chief of the Spanish armed forces dismissed these chats, leaked from a private Whatsapp group, as ‘‘not representative’’ of the Spanish military forces.
Sanchez defended the amnesty deal as necessary to ease tensions and ‘‘heal the wounds’’ between the Spanish government and Catalonia but made clear his opposition to Catalan independence, referring to Catalan independence leaders as, ‘‘political leaders whose ideas I do not share and whose actions I reject.”
The current President of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, responded positively to the amnesty deal but clarified that a legal independence referendum was a democratic imperative: “The core of the problem is that there is an overwhelming majority in Catalonia that wants a referendum to decide our future… until now, Spain has rejected this possibility. Now, there is an opportunity to have a dialogue and negotiation about this issue.”
