Rajoy giving a speech during a plenary session held yesterday at the Upper Chamber of Spanish Parliament in Madrid. The prime minister has said that the Catalonian move ‘divides Catalans, alienates them from Europe and the rest of Spain and seriously harms their welfare’.
Catalonia’s regional government said yesterday that it would temporarily suspend formal campaigning for a referendum on independence from Spain, after Madrid filed a legal appeal to stop the vote taking place.
Madrid argues that the vote, called by Catalan leader Artur Mas for November 9, would breach Spain’s rule of law because it would be held in Catalonia alone, rather than in the whole of Spain.
It filed an appeal on Monday with the Constitutional Court to stop it going ahead, which Catalan officials now want to try and overturn.
With official campaigning halted for now, secessionist grassroots movements, which have swelled in recent years in the wealthy northeastern region and set the political agenda there, are likely to take centre stage.
Protesters were expected to gather yesterday outside town halls across Catalonia, with some demanding the November non-binding vote take place regardless of its legality.
The Catalan National Assembly, a powerful pressure group pushing for the independence vote, urged its supporters to gather outside town halls across Catalonia to protest the court’s ruling.
“Today we start building a new country! At 7pm everyone outside of your town halls! Now is the time, it’s up to us!” the group said in a Twitter message.
Hundreds of thousands of people had already packed onto the streets of Barcelona on September 11, the region’s national day, calling for the right to vote on a potential split from Spain.
That fervour was boosted by a Scottish referendum on independence from Britain in September, even though it ended in a “No” vote.
The legal suspension of Catalonia’s plans had been expected for months, although Mas defied Madrid by calling the vote anyway, and is still pushing for ways for it to go ahead.
“In the next few hours we will file our allegations to overturn the suspension of the vote,” Francesc Homs, official spokesman for the Catalan government, told reporters yesterday.
“Although we have withdrawn our campaign, we are not pulling out,” he said.
Homs said they had stopped the campaign so as not to put the region’s civil servants in a delicate situation by making them work on a banned referendum.
“We do not want to put the public workers’ backs against the wall,” he told a news conference. “Nothing has ended and the government is determined to move forward. We can’t give the signal that we have given up.”
A large majority of people in Catalonia, a region with its own widely spoken language and distinct culture, agree that they want to hold a referendum on independence, polls show, and support for independence has been rising – although not to the point where it is clear that the region would vote to break away from Spain.
Catalans are proud of their language and culture and many of the region’s 7.5mn inhabitants feel that they get a raw deal from the government in Madrid, which decides how their taxes are spent.
Catalonia formally adopted the status of a “nation” in 2006 but Spain’s Constitutional Court later overruled that claim.
Spain’s conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has said that he “deeply” regretted Mas’s move, saying it “divides Catalans, alienates them from Europe and the rest of Spain and seriously harms their welfare”.
In a televised address to the nation on Monday, he said the right to decide a region’s status belonged to “all the Spanish people” under the country’s 1978 constitution – the keystone of Spain’s democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco.
Mas is under pressure from the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left (ERC), the left-leaning party that props up his Convergence and Union (CiU) grouping in parliament, to defy the court order.
Earlier this month, ERC leader Oriol Junqueras said that Catalans should consider civil disobedience, “just like Martin Luther King”, if the central government denied them the chance to vote.
Mas has hinted that if the central government blocks the independence vote he could call an early regional election that would act as a plebiscite on the issue.
Polls suggest the ERC could make big gains if Mas were to call early elections, leaving Madrid facing a Catalan government more fiercely set on independence.
