“The year of liberty”

Ei­ther di­a­logue and jus­tice, or a re­volt – all in favour of a sole ob­jec­tive, free­dom. This is the boiled-down ver­sion of the New Year’s speech by Quim Torra, pres­i­dent of the Gen­er­al­i­tat, which he de­liv­ered yes­ter­day from the Plaça de Sant Jaume, next to a Cata­lan flag, and a promi­nent bou­quet of yel­low flow­ers. “We are pre­pared for the year of lib­erty, fast-ap­proach­ing,” said the pres­i­dent, who warned that it would be a year of dif­fi­cul­ties, marked by the Supreme Court tri­als against lead­ers of the in­de­pen­dence process. The pres­i­dent made it clear that he did not ex­pect any­thing good to come in terms of sen­tenc­ing, and that the free­dom of the po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers would only come through the achieve­ment of col­lec­tive free­dom. “As our beloved Josep Pal­lac said, ‘no cit­i­zen is free if his peo­ple are not free’”. Torra recog­nised the in­de­fati­ga­ble en­ergy of the cit­i­zen mov­ment de­mand­ing the re­lease of po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers and the re­turn of the ex­iles and in­vited them to hold firm, and “to rebel be­fore in­jus­tice, and top­ple the walls of op­pres­sion”. In his speech, the pres­i­dent picked up his re­cent dis­cus­sion with the Span­ish pres­i­dent, Pedro Sánchez, and in­sisted on the need to find a di­a­logued so­lu­tion for the po­lit­i­cal cri­sis in Cat­alo­nia. “We will not stop in­sist­ing on di­a­logue, ne­go­ti­a­tion and in­ter­na­tional me­di­a­tion,” the pres­i­dent said be­fore adding that “the state must show a will­ing­ness to be part of a cred­i­ble, sin­cere and coura­geous di­a­logue for a de­mo­c­ra­tic and po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion to pre­vail”. “We are Re­pub­li­cans. We will not ac­cept re­pres­sion to re­solve po­lit­i­cal is­sues. We de­mand to ex­er­cise the right to self-de­ter­mi­na­tion.”