1-O, prelude to a hot autumn

A com­mem­o­ra­tion of the sec­ond an­niver­sary of the Oc­to­ber 1 ref­er­en­dum will be the start­ing point for an au­tumn of demon­stra­tions through­out the coun­try that will reach fever pitch with the re­ac­tion to the Span­ish Supreme Court’s rul­ing on the Cata­lan po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers. On Oc­to­ber 1, Òmnium Cul­tural, the Cata­lan Na­tional As­sem­bly (ANC), Junts per Catalunya, the ERC and CUP par­ties pre­sented a uni­fied frame­work for ac­tion in protest at the an­tic­i­pated sen­tenc­ing of the pris­on­ers. The ANC is prepar­ing three cit­i­zen marches to ar­rive in Barcelona and “col­lapse” the road net­work in re­sponse to the court’s rul­ing. The mo­bil­i­sa­tion is de­signed to last for three days and cover 100 kilo­me­tres of the coun­try’s main roads: a cit­i­zen march of 40 kilo­me­tres on the first two days and 20 on the third. Apart from these marches, the ANC is plan­ning a mass demon­stra­tion in the cap­i­tal, as well as other ac­tions yet to be de­cided. The As­sem­bly will this month also hold a meet­ing to de­ter­mine its po­si­tion with re­gard to the up­com­ing Span­ish gen­eral elec­tion on No­vem­ber 10. Be­fore those elec­tions, a gen­eral strike has been called for Fri­day, Oc­to­ber 11, when the Supreme Court rul­ing is ex­pected to be an­nounced.

That aside, acts were or­gan­ised around the coun­try on Oc­to­ber 1 under the slo­gan “Let’s fin­ish what we started. Let’s win our in­de­pen­dence”. The Barcelona march started in Plaça de Catalunya at seven in the evening and passed in front of the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion head­quar­ters in Barcelona, which was oc­cu­pied last Feb­ru­ary as a protest over the pris­on­ers’ trans­fer to Madrid.

Oc­to­ber 1 com­mem­o­ra­tion