The twist

Last month, in a wan­tonly hip com­par­i­son, the Fi­nan­cial Times used two pop­u­lar po­lit­i­cal drama se­ries - Den­mark's 'Bor­gen' and Amer­ica's (though orig­i­nally Britain's) 'House of Cards' - to ex­plain the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence process, de­scribed by Madrid cor­re­spon­dent To­bias Buck as 'an en­gross­ing feast of po­lit­i­cal drama with cliffhang­ers, sur­prise turns and last-minute rev­e­la­tions so im­prob­a­ble they would make a tele­vi­sion scriptwriter blush.' This is any­thing but ex­ag­ger­ated: the in­de­pen­dence 'drama' began back in 2006, when the Cata­lan par­lia­ment ap­proved a new Au­ton­omy Statute which would have given Cat­alo­nia a sim­i­lar sta­tus to the semi-fed­eral Basque Coun­try and per­haps solved the 'Cata­lan Ques­tion' for many years to come. How­ever, al­though the Statute was rat­i­fied in the Span­ish par­lia­ment (which wil­fully hacked off a few bits), after a four year wait it was fi­nally bowd­lerised (dis­em­bow­elled would be a bet­ter word) by the Span­ish Con­sti­tu­tional Court, at the be­hest of the right-wing Par­tido Pop­u­lar and Spain's (so­cial­ist) om­buds­man. This re­sulted in a spon­ta­neous one mil­lion strong demo in Barcelona. Madrid ig­nored it. Pres­sure built. Two years later, in 2012, the largest pro-indy demon­stra­tion ever held in Barcelona (about one and a half mil­lion peo­ple) prompted the then Cata­lan pres­i­dent, Artur Mas, to ask the Span­ish pre­mier, Mr. Rajoy, for some mild fi­nan­cial re­forms. That failed. Mas then de­cided to go full tilt, and opted for an in­de­pen­dence process which, after all, al­ready had con­sid­er­able pop­u­lar back­ing. Later, in 2013 and 2014 up totwo mil­lion peo­ple demon­strated in favour of in­de­pen­dence, in Barcelona alone. Polls showed that over 80% of Cata­lans wanted a ref­er­en­dum on the issue. Madrid re­fused to ne­go­ti­ate one, so Mas pro­posed a non-bind­ing con­sul­ta­tion. Madrid banned it. The Cata­lan gov­ern­ment went ahead any­way - after weeks of wran­gling be­tween local po­lit­i­cal par­ties about the word­ing of the ques­tions on the bal­lot pa­pers - and nearly two and half mil­lion peo­ple fi­nally voted on 9/11/14. Madrid ig­nored the re­sults and in­dicted Mas and two other Cata­lan min­is­ters for de­fy­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion. Given con­tin­u­ous pop­u­lar pres­sure to move on, Cata­lan pro-indy politi­cians de­cided to make the up­com­ing Cata­lan par­lia­men­tary elec­tions into a kind of plebiscite, but then squab­bled for months about how to go about it. At the last minute, Mas's party and the Cata­lan Re­pub­li­can Left, plus some non-party in­de­pen­dents, formed a coali­tion called To­gether for Yes (Junts pel Sí), which com­peted with the far left Pop­u­lar Unity Can­di­dacy (CUP) for the pro-indy vote. Junts pel Sí ob­tained 62 seats and the CUP, 10: to­gether, they had an ab­solute ma­jor­ity. But then, they couldn't agree on how to work to­gether, the stum­bling block being - at least for the CUP - the pres­ence of Mas, who they re­garded as being be­yond the anti-cap­i­tal­ist pale. When all seemed lost, Mas stepped down at the eleventh hour, a so­cial de­mo­c­ra­tic mayor from his own party was pro­posed as pres­i­dent, the CUP ac­cepted, and Cat­alo­nia now has a func­tion­ing, pro-in­de­pen­dence, cross-party gov­ern­ment. Whew! And this month...