BACK ON THE STREETS

Getting people back on the streets – Tornem als carrers – is the main goal of the organisers of this year’s September 11 demonstration defending Catalonia’s right to self-determination. Whether people heed the call and turn out for the protest held every year on Catalonia’s national day, known as the Diada, or whether they decide to stay at home, as they have done increasingly in recent years, the 2024 event will mark a turning point in the trajectory of the independence movement.

What makes this year stand out is the fact that for the first time in over a decade, the – albeit shaky – political unity underpinning the independence movement has been shattered. This is primarily because the pro-independence parties lost their narrow collective majority in parliament in the Catalan elections on May 12. Yet the final nail in the coffin of political unity came when the ERC republican left party, governing by itself after disagreements saw the Junts party abandon the pro-independence coalition (which had only scraped into power thanks to the leftwing CUP party holding its nose and lending its votes), struck a deal with the unionist PSC Catalan socialists to make their leader Salvador Illa president.

And all of this in a context of flagging enthusiasm for the independence movement – the latest poll from the Centre for Opinion Studies published in July said that support for an independent Catalonia had fallen to 40%, the lowest point in a decade.

That’s why this year’s Diada can be described as a turning point: the independence movement as we have known it for the past ten or more years is over and is now entering a new stage that will require a new strategy and a new approach.

For the moment, Junts has been left carrying the standard of pro-independence and has an opportunity to make political hay by portraying ERC, which ironically since its inception in the 1930s has always championed the cause of an independent Catalonia, as selling out the independence movement. Even though Junts may benefit from such a stance in the short term, it cannot politically represent the entire spectrum of the independence movement and eventually ERC will have to return to the fold, presumably once it has overcome its internal disarray and, almost inevitably, disengages from its pragmatic – and to many in the party distasteful – association with the Catalan socialists. In other words, restoring political unity within the independence movement will not be easy or quick. What’s more, if PSC is seen to do a good job in government, any hope of recapturing the lost parliamentary majority will be even further away than it is today.

I doubt many of those many thousands who filled the streets a decade ago to call for independence have changed their minds, or their hearts, even if they have stopped attending the demos. So now it falls to the Catalan National Assembly, Òmnium Cultural, the Council of the Republic and the other pro-independence organisations to hold the fort and do what they can to rally the public and keep the movement going in the right direction, and that begins with this September 11.

Opinion