MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

At the time of writ­ing, the of­fi­cial cam­paign pe­riod for the Cata­lan par­lia­men­tary elec­tion to be held this month has just kicked off. Democ­racy was ab­sent for al­most 40 years in Spain dur­ing the Fran­coist regime, but boy, are they mak­ing up for it now!

A year ago, on May 28, local elec­tions were held all over Spain, which were fol­lowed by a gen­eral Span­ish elec­tion on July 23. We will now have an­other elec­tion on May 12 to choose a new Cata­lan gov­ern­ment (see our fea­ture on page 10). No sooner will the bal­lot boxes be put away be­fore it will be time to get them out again for the Eu­ro­pean elec­tion, which will be held in Spain on Sun­day June 9.

With so much vot­ing going on, we can only pre­sume that we must have one of the health­i­est democ­ra­cies around, and as a con­se­quence one of the most free and open so­ci­eties on the planet. The other thing that comes to mind is that if Spain is so keen on vot­ing, why should the idea of let­ting Cat­alo­nia vote on its sov­er­eignty be such a no-no?

For­give my cyn­i­cism but the whole vot­ing issue is a sore point for me. As I have ranted about in pre­vi­ous columns – and at the risk of re­peat­ing my­self – I think it is pretty dis­grace­ful that I am al­lowed to pay taxes, own prop­erty, be legally re­spon­si­ble for un­der­age Spaniards (my chil­dren), have a dri­ving li­cence, or own a busi­ness, in other words to live my life as – and here I will re­peat my­self – a law-abid­ing tax­payer who is bring­ing up a new gen­er­a­tion of tax­pay­ers at my own ex­pense and yet I am not al­lowed to vote be­cause my pass­port is the wrong colour. The an­swer I argue (again) is not for peo­ple like me to be un­will­ingly forced to change our na­tion­al­ity (re­mem­ber the part ear­lier about a de­mo­c­ra­tic, free and open so­ci­ety) but sim­ply to let legally res­i­dent for­eign­ers vote in re­gional and state elec­tions.

I swear I didn’t start this col­umn in­tend­ing to rant about my First World prob­lems; the ar­gu­ment I wanted to make was that even if you don’t have a vote you can still make your voice heard. For ex­am­ple, you can have an im­pact by en­cour­ag­ing those who can vote to ex­er­cise their right, es­pe­cially those who have no in­ten­tion of doing so. You can join a po­lit­i­cal party or other or­ga­ni­za­tion that aligns with your po­si­tion and help them to get their mes­sage out there. You can sign pe­ti­tions – and with on­line pe­ti­tions you don’t even have to leave the house – or give money to causes you be­lieve in to put pres­sure on those in power. You can write let­ters to news­pa­pers or start a pod­cast or YouTube chan­nel ar­gu­ing your point of view. You can go to demon­stra­tions and protests. You can ’like’ and ’share’ so­cial media posts that rep­re­sent your po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests. Even with­out a vote you can par­tic­i­pate in the po­lit­i­cal process. You can make your voice heard.

opin­ion