And now the Catalan parliament has voted in favour of the UDI. This is not going to end well.
Yeah, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if there’s no more blood in the streets by the time this is all settled.
If they had just let the Moors keep the damn place, none of this would have happened.
With some luck that will be avoided. I put my hope in smart, hardworking honest people that like you, like me, don’t want that type of shit.
Puidgemont has requested political asylum from Brussels, apparently.
I think they have a cream for that.
Wrt to Catalonia, Spain won’t allow the fracturing of the country, come what may.
This is a nice day for an update, is it not? So, hey, vote today, wonder what the newspapers are going to say tomorrow…
So, elections are done, and per Portuguese newspapers, the party with the most votes is against independence but the independentist coalition still has an absolute majority.
Catalan mess 2018 incoming?
Incoming?
Just stable. I don’t think it will explode in 2018. Probably after the next Spanish elections at the earliest. The mess is the same as it was. Thinking something would change with this elections was very naive, imho. As I said above the Spanish government strategy was stupid, ineffective and blind to the reality on the ground. If anything they polarized the two sides even more, without moving anybody from one side to another.
So the update is that there’s no update. While the non-independence vote has been grouped on one single party, the percentage of population voting for parties for independence keeps stable at about 47.5% (which means there’s a majority of anti independence vote, but a really thin one). The parliamentary system is what it is, and the independentist will retain majority, just as I expected.
On course the Catalan nationalists feel this parliamentary majority is enough to justify a sweeping change against which more than half of the population is, but such are the ways of extremist nationalism.
They have become more populist, though, with the most popular of the three nationalist parties calling for an EU referendum in Catalonia (which I’m sure they would lose, but they want to gain those anti-EU votes).
In my opinion there needs to be a social change either for independence or against it to resolve the issue. With the percentages during the past two decades nothing can be really resolved (just postponed):
Sedition?
Can there ever be a place for sedition trials in a democracy?
Yea that’s super stupid of Spain.
Asking that is seditious!
It’s sedition to avoid the rebellion charge, which was dropped to try to defuse the situation somewhat. Note that sedition is described differently in the Spanish penal code as: uprising against authority without reaching the level of rebellion or treason.
What they have been condemned for is not their discourse or speech (the current leader of Catalonia’s government is a hardcore independentist, and he’s fine. They are actually the ones organizing the protest against the rulings and calling for civil disobedience), but their illegal behavior. The the equivalent for the California Governor and his team to set up and organize an illegal referendum (not only in nature or legal authority -which they didn’t have- but also using a self collected census, to begin with, and without the ability to double check voter identity or double voting) and then declare independence for California, while having acted against Supreme Court rulings to actually not do that. I don’t know what’s that in the US code, but I’m certain it’s a crime.
It’s a weird position the government is in: you don’t want to be too strong in the reaction (certainly the police action on the voting day was a huge mistake, imho, and today it seems they are not applying enough constraint either) but you also can’t let such a disregard for judicial rulings go without penal consequences or you discredit the rule of law.
Spain has historically been… not democratic.
I mean they were the longest lasting fascist nation as far as I know. They only started to transition to democracy after Franco finally died in 1975. That they’d have weird fascisty stuff left over isn’t surprising.
Again, there’s little not democratic about this.
What would the US government have done in the case it happened there?
Oh, wait, there was a war.
For the record, I’m actually in favor of a vote in Catalonia and would support such a move by a national party, but done correctly and within the rules and the law (I do think independence is stupid, being an EU federalist, and is the same kind of ethnonationalism as seen in Brexit or Trump supporters or other movements in Europe. But I do think people should be able to choose).
50% of Catalonia’s population votes against independence every election (and 50% for). forcing it through fait accompli is not democratic and can’t be allowed. Bringing to justice the public office holders who executed it seems to be the most measured response (and we could certainly have done without the police charges).
Most likely the sentence will move up to the European Human Rights Court. I think there’s a chance it’s thrown away or reduced there, since the events last year lie in a gray area in the penal code subject to interpretation (a crime, certainly, but what crime exactly was not crystal clear).
Yes you can. You point and laugh at the unconstitutional and meaningless “referendum” and the pointless gesture politics involved in a Declaration of Independence with no legal basis and then get on with the normal process of democratic politics.
You can also laugh at ignoring a Supreme Court order, I guess? And to use the public police force to help the breaking of the law? Because that’s the base of the sentence. Politicians have to be subject to the law as anybody else, although I guess that’s an open question in the UK right now. What would have happened if Boris Johnson had instructed the police to not reopen parliament after the ruling and the police had complied? Should we have shrugged?
That the law maybe should change is a different issue.
I dunno, if Boris Johnson were to ignore law and the courts and take the UK out of the EU on Oct 31 and use law enforcement to suppress parliamentary objections, I somehow doubt the reaction would be to say oh, what a kidder, yuk yuk.
Similar examples come to mind for the US.
Crimes such as Treason, or Sedition, or “uprising against authority” are inherently political. They’re the outdated language of angry monarchs.
Courts enforce rulings by, well, enforcing them. I saw no sign that Madrid had any trouble enforcing the law. Criminal prosecution is an entirely separate choice. And of course, some of the “criminals” weren’t public officials, were they? Running a political campaign and organising demonstrations was enough for detention without bail and nine years imprisonment for “sedition”.
Those two sentences are the two questionable ones from the ruling, yes. Out of 13. The other 11 were public officials acting against a direct court order at the time.
Yet, they have not been condemned for “organizing demonstrations” or for “running a political campaign”, but for organizing opposition to the fulfillment of a court order from a public leadership position, although not a public office, stopping the police as they tried to fulfill their duties.
But again, these two convictions are the most likely to be overruled by the European Human Rights Court and I think that would be fair.