Not one to miss out on

So, fi­nally the mo­ment of truth is al­most upon us. Soon the long-awaited Sep­tem­ber 27 elec­tions will be here and vot­ers in Cat­alo­nia will get a (sort of) chance to de­cide the fu­ture of the coun­try. Nat­u­rally, it is not what every­one would have cho­sen, but it looks like the best that can be done given the cir­cum­stances.

To be hon­est I'm amazed it's got this far. I have been hear­ing about the in­de­pen­dence issue since I first ar­rived two decades ago, and as far as I can see very lit­tle has been done until now to make it hap­pen (with some no­table ex­cep­tions, of course). My opin­ion on the issue when­ever it has come up in con­ver­sa­tion has usu­ally been en­cour­ag­ing. After all, aren't we al­ways ad­vised not to give up on our dreams? How­ever, I will also admit to in­creas­ingly think­ing: “Well, get on with it, then. What are you telling me for, go and tell the gov­ern­ment?”

Well, it seems as if peo­ple have fi­nally de­cided to do some­thing about it rather than just bitch­ing to the likes of me, who doesn't even get to vote. And I have to say that the po­lit­i­cal elites have re­sponded to the call of the peo­ple and, again given the cir­cum­stances, have pre­sum­ably done a fairly good job in get­ting this far rather than mess­ing it up, which at one point it looked like they were going to do.

Whether you have a vote or not, whether you are in favour of in­de­pen­dence or not, it is prob­a­bly a good idea to at least be pay­ing at­ten­tion over the next few weeks. When the dust set­tles after the elec­tion, it will prob­a­bly be an ad­van­tage to know how we got to wher­ever we end up. And to do that, we at least need to know how the board looked be­fore the dice were thrown.

For­tu­nately, that is ex­actly what we have in this edi­tion of the mag­a­zine (pages 20 to 25): an overview of the pre-elec­toral sit­u­a­tion, de­tail­ing who the main play­ers are, where they stand and what is sup­posed to hap­pen next. We also have an in-depth in­ter­view with Raül Romeva (the guy on the front cover who is head­ing the pro-sov­er­eignty cross-party list, Junts pel Sí), as well as opin­ion, news and a focus on some of the rel­e­vant side is­sues of the sov­er­eignty process. You won't learn every­thing you need to know about the issue here, but it's a good place to start. If that sounds like the sort of thing you are look­ing for, then why not go back and check it out, if you haven't al­ready. These are ex­cit­ing times, and vote or no vote, I for one don't want to miss a thing.