Opinion

THE LAST WORD

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

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