Spain

Catalonia: everything stays the same, so everything must change

"If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change", says the young aristocrat Tancredi to his uncle, the Prince, in the turmoil of Italian unification as portrayed in Lampedusa's novel The Leopard . Catalonia's election results on 21 December may be a matter of everything having to change because everything has remained the same. The results surprised mostly in how little change they showed in Catalan opinion and in Rajoy's response. Thus they have made the status quo pretty much untenable, short of all the parameters being changed by a large revival in Spain's sick economy. In...

Catalonia goes to the polls

The constitutional crisis in Catalonia continues to simmer as the region awaits elections on 21 December. A number of Catalan politicians and activists, including members of the recently dismissed government, have been denied bail and remain jailed on charges of sedition. Some are in exile in Belgium. The Spanish government has been directly administering Catalonia now since late October. While there have been large-scale demonstrations against the suspension of regional autonomy and political arrests, the civil disobedience among local government and regional police that some predicted has...

Vote is tight in Catalonia

On 5 December, the Spanish Supreme Court withdrew its international arrest warrant against Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and four other members of the government who have sought refuge in Belgium. Other Catalan politicians, arrested in Spain, have however been refused bail and will have to run their campaigns for Catalonia’s 21 December elections from jail. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy still hopes to regain control on 21 December by scaring lukewarm supporters of Catalan independence into voting for anti-independence parties. The opinion polls still show little movement. They...

Catalonia: for self-determination

The latest opinion polls for the parliamentary election in Catalonia on 21 December suggest an outcome similar to the previous election in 2015: a narrow parliamentary majority for the separatists, but with a minority of the popular vote. A 15 November poll gives the ERC 24%, Puigdemont’s people (running as Junts per Catalunya) 17%, and CUP 6%, in total 47% of the vote but 68-74 seats out of 135. The non-separatist parties — in order of their electoral support, the neoliberal Citizens’ Party, the social-democratic PSC (linked to the PSOE elsewhere in Spain), Catalonia in Common (including...

Catalonia: rights and unity

Editorial from Solidarity 454 On Saturday 11 November, 750,000 people (on the city police’s count) demonstrated in Barcelona to demand the release of Catalan government ministers and pro-independence association activists jailed by the Madrid regime to await trial on charges such as sedition. A general strike called by a pro-independence union confederation, Intersindical-CSC, under the slogan “Defend Our Rights”, on Wednesday 8 November, also had impact. The reports suggest it was more through demonstrators blocking railway lines and roads than the major concentrations of workers deciding to...

Madrid tries to bludgeon Catalonia

The people of Catalonia are caught up in a macabre game of bluff and who-blinks-first. The democratic way out is for the people of Catalonia to be able to vote in a fair referendum on independence. Previous polls have indicated no majority for secession, and many on the left in Catalonia (for good reasons, we think) oppose creating a new border; but if there is now a majority for separation, then Madrid, and the EU, should respect it. Over a hundred years ago, in a classic statement of Marxist and democratic ideas on disputes between nations, Lenin described the procedures in the secession of...

Catalonia, the "Norwegian way", and Lenin

"It is the bounden duty", wrote Lenin, "of class-conscious workers to conduct systematic propaganda and prepare the ground for the settlement of conflicts that may arise over the secession of nations, not in the 'Russian way', but only in the way they were settled in 1905 between Norway and Sweden. "This is exactly what is meant by the demand in the program for the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination". The "Russian way" meant the way national conflicts were settled under the Tsar (and would be settled again under Stalin). Oppressed nations were told to shut up and submit...

Catalonia: oppose Rajoy’s repression!

Around 450,000 took to the streets of Barcelona on 22 October to protest against Madrid’s threat to impose direct rule and the arrests of activists. The CUP — the left-separatist party that props up Puigdemont’s coalition of right-wing and left-wing nationalists — has called for a mass mobilisation and resistance to prevent direct rule from going ahead. Catalan civil servants are likely to refuse to administer Madrid rule, and the Madrid government has threatened to remove from post all employees who fail to follow the instructions of a directly-administered regime. A potentially explosive...

Catalonia: no to Madrid clampdown!

The Spanish government in Madrid says that it will suspend regional autonomy and impose direct rule on Catalonia from Thursday 19 October unless president Carles Puigdemont abandons his push for independence for the territory. A Madrid clampdown would, soon if not immediately, lead to violent clashes such as happened when the Spanish government tried to stop Catalonia’s 1 October referendum. The Catalan police might well side with the Catalan government against Spanish government forces. On 10 October Catalan president Carles Puigdemont fell short of a full-scale declaration of independence...

Letters

The BBC should hang its head in shame. Their documentary (aired 9 October) about the Russian Revolution was appalling. Anyone wanting to know what happened and why in 1917 will need to go elsewhere, consulting the Oracle at Delphi would be more rewarding. No kind of analysis or narrative of the events of 1917 was offered, nor any attempt to tackle important questions and certainly no attempt to offer a range of views for debate. Instead the viewer was bombarded with a venomous and, at times, monumentally stupid, lambasting of the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Trotsky. The makers of the...

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