The struggle over strategy in the Catalan independence movement

Dick Nichols

1. Introduction: Cracks widen in the independence bloc

Last December 21, the three parliamentary forces supporting Catalan independence-- Together
for Catalonia (JxCat), the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the People’s Unity List
(CUP)--together won a 70-65 seat majority in the 135-seat Catalan parliament. Six months of
drawn-out negotiations over forming a pro-independence government followed.

During this period Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, instructing magistrate with
regard to alleged offences in relation to the October 1, 2017 Catalan independence referendum,
prohibited JxCat and ERC MPs in preventive detention and exile from standing for Catalan
president or as ministers in any new Catalan government. Llarena’s work was backed up by the
Spanish Constitutional Court, acting at the behest of the former People’s Party (PP) government
of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.

On March 23, Llarena indicted 25 Catalan political and social movement leaders on charges of
rebellion, sedition and misuse of public moneys, carrying penalties of up to 30 years jail and the
first step in a show trial to be held later this year or early next year. In the meantime, nine Catalan
political and social movement leaders remain in preventive detention and seven in exile.

On May 29, after the Spanish state institutions had successfully blocked three presidential and
four ministerial nominations, JxCat and the ERC finally managed to form a coalition government
under JxCat president Quim Torra. The Spanish government coup against Catalan self-rule,
conducted on October 27 under the cover of article 155 of the Spanish constitution, then ended
and it seemed that a stable Catalan administration, albeit one under constant pressure from the
Spanish state, had been put in place. However, the Torra government was put into a minority just
four months later, in the October 9 session of the Catalan parliament,

While the stability of the Catalan government has so far not been affected, the always conflictive
relationship between JxCat and the ERC has reached a new low. How did matters go downhill so
fast?

Llarena’s web

The immediate cause was Llarena’s July 9 decision to temporarily suspend from the Catalan
parliament six JxCat and ERC candidates who were elected on December 21. They were former
president Carles Puigdemont, former vice-president Oriol Junqueras, former ministers Jordi
Turull, Josep Rull and Raül Romeva and former president of the Catalan National Assembly
(ANC), Jordi Sànchez. Of these, Puigdemont is in exile in Belgium while the rest have been in
preventive detention for up to a year.

Llarena acted under section 384b of the Spanish criminal indictment act, which dictates automatic
suspension from public office until their case is decided of any detainee who “belongs or is
related to armed gangs or individual terrorists or rebels". The section was originally designed to

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keep supporters of the Basque armed organisation Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA) from
taking up parliamentary positions.

On July 30, the Supreme Court full bench upheld Llarena’s suspension of the Catalan MPs, with a
ruling that "rebellion" could take place in the absence of weapons or explosives, in contradiction
with a 1987 Constitutional Court ruling that their use is a necessary feature of what lawfully
constitutes rebellion.

To dodge the charge that he was trying to eliminate the Catalan parliamentary majority, Llarena
ruled that the suspended MPs could delegate their vote to substitutes, an improvisation on his part
unsupported by any provision in the statute book. He left the implementation of his decision not
to the individual MPs, but to the Catalan parliament’s speakership board (effectively to
negotiations between JxCat and the ERC that together have a four-to-three majority on that
body).

Llarena’s ruling immediately became an apple of discord between the two main pro-
independence goupings. JxCat--the broad-based umbrella created by Carles Puigdemont for the
December 21 election--argued that parliament had to assert its sovereignty and legitimacy against
the interference of the Supreme Court judge. This was all the more so given that the crimes with
which the MPs were charged had not been recognised as such by the German and Belgian courts
from whom Llarena had vainly sought the extradition of Puigdemont and other former ministers.

For the ERC, the critical issue was avoiding a premature conflict with the powers of the Spanish
state. Rejecting Llarena’s ruling would lead to a condemnation by the Spanish legal system and
the prosecution of those associated with the decision, starting with ERC speaker of parliament
Roger Torrent.

Agreement, then disagreement

After three months of tension, including suspension of parliamentary sessions, the ERC and
JxCat announced an agreement on September 25. This would meet three goals without accepting
the suspensions ordered by Llarena: no MP would have to give up their seat; the pro-
independence majority would not change; and the votes taken in parliament would survive any
legal challenge.

The Catalan parliament’s sub-committee in charge of the rights of MPs then formulated the
agreement in a resolution that passed through parliament on October 2. It was the supported by
JxCat, ERC and Catalonia Together-Podemos (CatECP), the left coalition that supports a Catalan
right to decide but not necessarily independence. The third pro-independence force, the CUP,
voted against on the grounds that the resolution complied with Llarena’s dictates.

The Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC), sister organisation of the Spanish Socialist Workers
Party (PSOE) that presently governs in the Spanish state, did not vote, while the two right-wing
unionist parties, Citizens and the PP, walked out of the chamber in protest: Citizens indicated it
would bring a suit of unconstitutionality against the resolution in the Constitutional Court.

Upon its adoption the two ERC MPs affected, Junqueras and Romeva, passed on their vote to
substitute MPs. By contrast, the four JxCat MPs affected—Puigdemont, Sànchez, Turull and

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Rull—indicated that the head of the JxCat parliamentary group, Albert Batet, would continue to
vote on their behalf.

Upon parliament’s adoption of the resolution the PSC called on the speaker Torrent to seek the
opinion of the parliament’s legal counsel as to the constitutional status of the October 2 resolution
and the different ways of implementing it adopted by the ERC and JxCat. Torrent accepted this
request and on October 8 the counsel delivered its opinion that the voting arrangement
maintained by the four affected JxCat MPs did not "make use of the facility foreseen in the
Resolution of designating another member of their group to exercise the parliamentary rights of
the MPs."

The potential result of a refusal to nominate substitutes was that "if a parliamentarian is not
explicitly substituted by another, that parliamentarian cannot exercise their right to vote by
delegation [and] if they were to do so, that vote could not be counted as valid." Decisions
resulting from such an invalid vote would violate the rights of other MPs and open the Catalan
parliament to intervention by the Constitutional Court and the Spanish government making use of
its privileged access to it. That could lead in turn to possible indictment of speaker Torrent and
other speakership board members.

On October 9, the speakership board, accepting the legal counsel’s opinion, voted not to accept
delegated votes as implementing the October 2 resolution. The vote was ERC and PSC in favour,
JxCat against and Citizens abstaining. JxCat then had to decide on one of three possible
responses: accept substitution of its four affected MPs; continue to vote by delegation and have
the votes rejected by Torrent; or have the four MPs not vote.

Results and justifications

The JxCat group adopted this last option, reducing the size of the ERC-JxCat bloc from 65 to 61
and opening the door to the pro-independence camp finding itself in a minority of 65 (61 plus the
CUP’s four MPs). The result was immediately seen in that afternoon’s parliamentary session.
Support for a resolution backed by pro-independence forces alone would now only equal the total
possible vote of the rest of the parliamentary groups: if these voted together it would be lost after
a tied vote.

Such was the outcome of two resolutions covering the defence of the Republic and Catalonia’s
inalienable right to self-determination, and the censuring of Spanish King Philip for his notorious
October 3, 2017 speech justifying the police violence of October 1. More important than such
immediate losses, however, was the prospect of an unstable government less able to give initial
form to a Catalan Republic based on social advances that might be an attractive alternative to the
Kingdom of Spain.

However, for JxCat substituting their jailed and exiled MPs was a line in the sand that dignity
required they not cross. These MPs justified the choice in an October 9 letter:
[O]ur decision to maintain voting by delegation to the spokesperson of the JxCat parliamentary group is
perfectly in line with the law. We consider that delegation can only be rejected on the basis of reasoning
unconstrained by possible coercion by an organ outside the legislative power. (...)

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 We are convinced that the majority of 61 seats will allow the present government to maintain and drive
forward the republican project. (...)

We shall work for the violation of the right to political representation and the alteration of the majorities
arising from December 21 to be taken into consideration by international organisations and courts. Once
again, we shall go to Europe and the world to find the justice that the Spanish state denies us and denies
itself.

For the ERC, the priority remained maintaining the independence bloc’s parliamentary majority.
According to fraction head Sergi Sabrià, "We don’t need rhetoric, we need effective majorities"
and "a joint, long-term strategy". Sabrià pointed to the importance of having the government’s
budget adopted if its raft of social measures is to see the light of day.

JxCat MPs replied that, given CUP dismissal of the budget as just another Spanish regional
government offering, negotiations with CatECP were already necessary: the independence bloc’s
shrinking did not change anything of substance.

Former health minister and ERC MP Toni Comín, exiled in Brussels, told internet-based daily El
Món on October 11 that the outcome of the crisis was the least evil available, and should be de-
dramatised:
It is an absolutely understandable line in the sand to want to maintain President Puigdemont’s options
with regard to being restored [as president]. It’s as simple as that, it was the line with which they [JxCat]
went to the polls and won. And the line of President Torra when he was invested. And so, if President
Puigdemont cedes all his rights as an MP to another MP he runs the risk of losing the right to being
restored as president. And he has to maintain that right … because we are waiting for a ruling of the
Constitutional Court on the Law of the Presidencyi (…) It isn’t up to parliament to annul this right and if
the Constitutional Court does it by throwing out the Law of the Presidency, we’ll decide what has to be
done afterwards.

The line in the sand of the ERC is also understandable and reasonable when it says that it wants the
decisions of parliament to be immune to legal challenge (...)

If we respect these two lines in the sand (...) the only solution is what has ended up happening, the loss
of the majority. It’s still a big evil but the least of all the possible evils.

And reactions from Madrid? Spanish PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez jumped to
congratulate his government for having split the radicals from the reasonable people in Catalonia.
PP leader Pablo Casado demanded that Citizens immediately present a motion of no-confidence
in the Catalan parliament as a way of putting the PSC (and therefore the PSOE) on the spot.
Would the PSC vote in favour? Were Sánchez and his people in Catalonia really serious about
weeding out the independence menace?

2. The Catalan political atmosphere

Such reactions only confirmed the obvious: one year on from October 1 and after eight years of
million-plus demonstrations Catalonia’s rebellion remains the central issue of Spanish politics
and crushing or deflating it the central goal of any unionist government. Whatever their other
conflicts, the differences between the PP and PSOE on this issue are tactical: they argue noisily

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about what mix of carrot and stick can best achieve their shared desire of defeating the
“secessionist menace”.

On October 8, for example, Spanish foreign minister and hard cop Josep Borrell informed the
media as to why he hadn’t invited Catalan president Quim Torra to the 2018 edition of the
Regional Forum of the Union for the Mediterranean, even though the event was being held in
Catalonia’s capital, Barcelona:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided not to invite him so as not to give him a favourable platform
from which to continue vilifying the good name of Spain and so as not to distort this meeting by turning
it into something different from what it is meant to be.

Answering a reporter’s question, Borrell added:

[Torra] has to understand that he can’t declare that the Spanish State is his enemy, he can’t blackmail the
prime minister of the Spanish government by saying that if Sánchez doesn’t approve the referendum of
self-determination he [Torra] won’t pass anything for him. He can’t become the ring-leader of the street
agitators. (...) If he does that he can’t expect purely on the grounds of protocol to be invited to a
diplomatic event at which his presence is not indispensable.

The Catalan president tweeted in reply:

Truly, another one of Mr Borrell’s noble and elegant gestures, in this case towards the president of the
country where he was born. But don’t worry, Mr Borrell, I’ll get my speech out to all those who were
there.

How did relations between the minority PSOE government and president Torra reach this level of
animosity, when the Catalan government is represented in the Spanish congress by parties that
had supported the PSOE’s successful June no-confidence motion against former PP prime
minister Mariano Rajoy?

The immediate cause was Torra’s October 2 address to the Catalan parliament on his pro-
independence government’s program. In it he delivered an ultimatum to Sánchez: either start
genuine negotiations over a Scottish-style referendum for Catalonia or don’t expect us to keep
voting with you. This was a threat not to support the PSOE’s 2018-2019 budget: if not adopted
the likelihood of early Spanish elections would increase.

The Spanish government immediately rejected Torra’s ultimatum and restated its line that a
Catalan right to self-determination does not exist under the Spanish constitution. At the same time
it stressed its willingness to collaborate in improving Catalonia’s self-rule by addressing a 46-
point list of Catalan complaints that the Rajoy government had basically ignored.

Torra’s ultimatum was also a reaction to the criticism his government had received from within
the Catalan independence movement on the first anniversary of the October 1, 2017 referendum.
That had been a vast effort of popular mobilisation and organisation successfully carried out in
the teeth of aggression and sabotage by the Spanish National Police, Civil Guard and secret
service.

What had Torra’s administration done to implement the Catalan Republic the people voted for on
that fateful day? For many independence supporters the answer was "practically nothing": the

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first anniversary of October 1 saw protesters waving placards reading "Disobey or Resign!" and
"The People Give The Orders, The Government Obeys!" outside the parliament and government
(Generalitat) buildings in Barcelona. Torra’s reply to the crowd and in particular to the members
of the Committees in Defence of the Republic (CDR) who were leading the chants was: "You are
pressuring us and you do well to pressure us."

However, the Catalan president’s ultimatum to Pedro Sánchez didn’t go down well with any of
the main protagonists in the Catalonia-Spain conflict, not even with all the MPs of Torra’s own
JxCat. What follows are the essential reactions of the seven parties in the Catalan parliament, as
expressed by their spokespeople in the session in reply to Torra’s October 2 address. They
embody today’s main fault lines in Catalan politics.

Inés Arrimadas, spokesperson for Citizens, the main opposition party (speaking in Castilian):
And the reality for Catalans is that there has not been one single benefit from the [independence] process
[said in Catalan] for Catalan society, not one, not one. We have an unprecedented social and institutional
crisis in Catalonia. You people have attacked the institutions of Catalonia as no-one has in the forty years
of democracy. Because you can’t agree among yourselves about how to vote, you’ve closed down
plenary sessions of Parliament so as not to have to show your face.

You have created parallel structures to delegitimise this Parliament, with a Council of the Republic—that
alleged government that doesn’t have to come here into the chamber to answer for itself--a supposedly
legitimate president [Carles Puigdemont] with an Assembly of Representatives ... well a pile of shady
little operations that we can now see, but what they do at bottom is attack the legitimacy of this
parliament. Not to mention the ignominy of September 6 and 7ii, or of the attempted attack, violent and
physical, on this chamber by your commandos last Monday.iii

The truth about the process is that you don’t have any international support at all, not any, not a single
country, not a single European institution has given you support, but, yes, you’ve certainly seriously
damaged the image of Catalonia abroad. The reality is that in this process there have been violent acts by
the commandos that you cheer on, those that you ask to keep up the pressure, because it seems to you
that they’ve been getting soft, doesn’t it?

Miquel Iceta, leader of the PSC:

What is the balance sheet of the previous legislature? (...) We have a more divided society, a weaker
economy. We’ve suffered intervention into our institutions of self-government and there are political and
social movement leaders in jail awaiting trial or abroad. Independence didn’t arrive and self-government
was damaged. I believe I’m only offering a description and I’m not saying anything about
responsibilities.

From our point of view, if anything is clear it is the uselessness of the unilateral, illegal road, which had
harmful and counterproductive effects as well. What sense, then, would there be in trying to keep going
along that road? Wouldn’t it be better to put things right? To take a fresh look at approaches? I don’t say
"give up on the goal of independence", which is legitimate. I simply say that road doesn’t work, so try to
find another.

Jessica Albiach, spokesperson for CatECP:

The big headline is that you threatened Pedro Sánchez with instability in Spain if he didn’t give you a
proposal for a referendum within a month. So now we’re back to having on the table the new version of

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 "we’re in a hurry"iv, and what’s more we all know how that ended: it ended disastrously. Now impossible
deadlines and timetables are once again being imposed. And that, yes, after you recognised that you need
more political intelligence and more self-criticism, and that it’s necessary to speak more clearly. You say
that on the one hand, but on the other the facts are back to show the opposite. And now, after these three
months [since parliament last sat], we again find ourselves with a government that’s lost, that doesn’t
know where it’s going and improvises. Because you’ve got to grant me this: the ultimatum you gave
Pedro Sánchez yesterday is one of your new improvisations. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.

Carles Riera, spokesperson for the CUP:

Your announcement to the State, what you did yesterday when you asked for an answer about
Catalonia’s self-determination, has already completed its circuit: once again the Moncloa [the Spanish
prime minster’s headquarters] has said "No". Will you look for another pretext to keep kicking that can
down the road or will you now carry out an act of sovereignty?

Alejandro Fernández, spokesperson for the PP (speaking in Castilian):

We have in Catalonia today, not a president of the Generalitat, we have an activist fanatic. We do not
have in Catalonia today a leader who governs for everyone, we have a radicalised agitator. (...) We have
a parliament that does not legislate--in what we’ve had of its mandate to date one with the least
production of legislation in history. And that’s normal: because they prefer confrontation in the streets to
parliamentary debate.

Sergi Sabrià, spokeperson for the ERC:

This process is irreversible, but one question still remains for us to answer: When? We will probably take
more time than we hoped, more than we would like or than the Catalan people deserve. In part, because
we face an anti-democratic and authoritarian state that is prepared to use repression and violence to
defend the unity of its realm, even if that entails an enormous loss of prestige internationally. But let no-
one have the slightest doubt: we shall not cease from moving forward until we achieve this republic.

We don’t promise smoke, we promise deeds. And we do them. We are the people that make things
happen. They gave us the job of carrying out a referendum and we had a referendum. For some time now
we’ve been asking for a shared strategy and unity of action, realism and persistence, less gesticulation
and more strategy. It won’t be easy or quick, but we’ll do it. Whoever promises shortcuts today is naïve
or deceiving us.

Albert Batet, spokesperson for JxCat:

The people are there, the people are there. The room for manoeuvre has ended. Patience is finished. The
events of Monday and Saturday show that clearlyv: the people are there, and we have to properly value
the persistence and capacity for resistance of the people of Catalonia. Let’s not wait around for ever.
They are giving us that message: "We won’t wait around for ever." If there isn’t a proposal on the part of
the PSOE, the Catalan government will act and act with determination, as President Torra said. That’s
why we in JxCat today, here, commit to making a better country, we understand that the best mechanism
would be with full sovereignty. Meanwhile, the government governs.

Clear from these interventions are the differences among the ERC, JxCat and the CUP as to their
diagnoses of the Catalan political situation, and hence among their proposed paths and timetables
for getting to a Catalan Republic. Equally clear is the pressure from the PSC and the CatECP for
the independence camp to abandon once and for all any thought of unilateral self-determination.

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What stands out on the unionist side is the ferocity of the abuse of the pro-independence camp in
general and Torra in particular, reflecting their rabid competition for the unionist vote between
the PP under new leader Pablo Casado and Citizens’ Albert Rivera.

3. The PSOE government and Catalonia

More carrot...

The political landscape revealed here was shaped by the June 1 change of government in the
Spanish state. On that day the government of PP prime minister Rajoy fell to a no-confidence
motion over corruption that was launched by the PSOE and supported by Unidos Podemos and
the Basque, Catalan and Valencian nationalist and regionalist parties. The Sánchez administration
then installed in the Moncloa declared that it wanted to solve the Catalan crisis "politically" and
not "judicially".

Within the deposed PP, the reaction of the membership was to replace the "moderate" anti-
Catalanism of Rajoy, represented by his number two Soraya Saenz de Santamaria, with the
viscerally neo-Francoist anti-Catalanism of Casado, disciple of former PP prime minister José
María Aznar (1996-2004) and advocate of such measures as outlawing the CUP. At an October 11
PP rally in Castilla-La Mancha Casado said that his priorities were to "rescue [Catalan]
education, stop the Mossos d’Esquadra [the Catalan police] from receiving illegal orders, keep
propaganda off the television and stop the prisoners from doing what they want with the penal
institutions".

The election of Casado thus opened a political space for the PSOE to appear as the moderate,
practical and positive centre against the extremisms of Catalan secessionism and an all-Spanish
right pushing the effective liquidation of Catalan self-rule (a "permanent 155"). In the short run
this stance is paying dividends for the PSOE: it leads Spanish opinion polls since coming into
government, with a average of 27.1% support against the PP’s 22.7%. The PSOE has also
consolidated a break over Unidos Podemos, its rival for hegemony on the broad left of Spanish
politics, which is averaging 16.2%. At the same time Citizens, with 21.5% support, continues to
tread on the heels of the PP for hegemony of the right.

Since coming to office the PSOE government has: committed to release €1.449 billion in funds
owed the Catalan government; agreed to fully share anti-terrorism intelligence with the Catalan
police; withdrawn the previous government’s appeal against the constitutionality of Catalonia’s
law guaranteeing universal access to public health; and undertaken to increase central state
investment in Catalan infrastructure and to progress towards Catalan management of its regional
railways services (presently run by the Spanish national rail operator). Spanish infrasrtucture
minister José Luís Ábalos has also promised to consider sharing management of Barcelona’s El
Prat airport with the Generalitat.

The biggest PSOE move so far was its October 11 agreement with Podemos for the 2018-2019
Spanish budget. Among other measures, this would: increase the minimum wage from its present
€735.90 to €900 a month from 2019; re-index the pension to the CPI; increase paternity leave and
equalise it with maternity leave; introduce universal free education for 0 to 3 year-olds; increase
university scholarships; phase out the pharmaceutical co-payment; empower local councils to

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impose rent controls; and increase the minimum full-time work contract from three to five years.
The increased outlays of around €5 billion would be funded by an increase in income tax rates for
those earning above €130,000 annually and a 1% tax surcharge on companies with an annual
turnover above €10 million. The measures would eventually add €3.2 billion to spending in
Catalonia.

These measures will be welcome to the great majority of workers, students, pensioners and other
people on welfare. Given that their adoption by the Spanish congress will also require the support
of the ERC and possible abstention of conservative nationalist European Catalan Democratic
Party (PDECat), the pressure is on them not to ask for too much in return for their support—too
much being an independence referendum and/or the dropping of the charges against the Catalan
prisoners and exiles.

...but the same stick

The increases in possible carrot for Catalonia have therefore not yet come with any reduction in
the stick applied by the PP, except to allow the transfer of the Catalan prisoners to jails in
Catalonia (the "pay-out to the separatists" in PP-speak). Seductive-sounding PSOE messages
about a political solution, including the negotiation of a new Statute of Catalan autonomyvi, have
not affected the core of the conflict over the right to self-determination and the structure of the
Spanish state.

It should never be forgotten that when Spanish state unity has come under threat from the
aspirations to sovereignty of its component nations, the PSOE has been as relentless in repression
as the PP, most notoriously in relation to the "armed struggle" of Basque Homeland and Freedom
(ETA) in the 1980s and 1990s. During that time the murder squads of the Antiterrorist Liberation
Groups (GAL) were run out of the Spanish interior ministry under the PSOE government of
prime minister Felipe González.

In the Catalan case, while preventing a harsher article 155 intervention that would have involved
a takeover of Catalan TV and radio, the PSOE leadership still gave its support to the Rajoy
government’s illegal financial warfare against the Puigdemont government. This consisted in an
attempt to trigger a bank run by withdrawing €10 billion in the savings of various Spanish state
institutions from two Catalan banks and then encouraging private companies to follow suit. King
Philip was also brought in to do a ring-around of CEOs of major firms with registered
headquarters in Catalonia, urging them to shift these elsewhere in the state.

Ministers of the Sánchez government, including foreign minister Borrell, have stated that they
wish the jailed Catalan leaders were not in jail, but it has not taken the one step that could really
ease the crisis, namely to recognise the Catalan prisoners and exiles as legitimate political
representatives with whom they have to negotiate.

The PSOE government could also instruct the prosecutor-general’s office to withdraw its
accusations in the case. The pretence is that the separation of powers prevents this, but since the
prosecutor-general is an employee of the state, this is not the case. However, there is debate
within pro-sovereignty circles as to whether this would be politically smart, as it would further
antagonise the prosecutors’ office, which claims it is only doing its duty in law and also create an

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opportunity for the PP and Citizens to parade (totally falsely) as champions of the division of
powers.

(Incidentally, the Sánchez government’s inconsistency on the issue of the division of powers was
demonstrated on August 30 when it contracted Belgian law firm Liederke Wolters Waelbroeck
Kirpatrick for €545,000 to carry out the defence of the independence of the Spanish judiciary
after Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and the Catalan ex-ministers in exile had brought a
private suit against judge Llarena in a Belgian court. The Belgian government had previously
refused the request of foreign minister Borrell that it act in defence of Llarena in the case.)

The PSOE government, even if it were tempted to drop the impending show-trial, will never
antagonise a Spanish establishment for whom the unity of its state is the supreme commandment.
No less than the parties of the right, the PSOE recoils from any talk of the right to self-
determination and from Catalonia’s republican rejection of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy, the
other pillar of the regime established in the transition from the Franco dictatorship.

A revealing example of its jumpiness over this last issue came after the Catalan parliament
adopted this resolution on October 11:
The Parliament of Catalonia:

1. Requires all the institutions of the [Spanish] State to guarantee social harmony and cohesion and the
free expression of political pluralism within the State. In this sense it deplores acts of repression against
citizens and condemns threats to apply article 155, bans on political parties, treatment of political issues
as a question of criminal law and violence against basic rights.

2. Requires Catalan institutions and political parties to engage in dialogue and the search for agreement
and to respect the plurality of the different options of all Catalan women and men.

3. Rejects and condemns the position of King Philip VI and his intervention into the Catalan conflict,
along with his justification of police force violence on October 1.

4. Reaffirms its commitment to republican values and commits to the abolition of an out-of-date and
anti-democratic institution such as the monarchy.

In favour: CatECP (mover), JxCat, ERC. Against: PSC, Citizens, PP. Abstaining: CUP. Carried 69 to 57
with 4 abstentions

The reaction of the Moncloa came immediately in this tweet from prime minister Sánchez:
The resolution adopted this afternoon in the Parliament of Catalonia that aims to reject and condemn the
Head of State is unacceptable. This #Government will adopt the legal measures available to it in defence
of legality, the Constitution and the institutions of the State.

The essential role of the PSOE on the national question in the Spanish state was nicely captured
in this October 11 Ferreres cartoon in the Catalan daily Ara, picturing the ecstatic reaction of
Sánchez, Llarena and King Philip to the news that the pro-independence parties were now in a
minority in the Catalan parliament. The Sánchez government has since lodged a suit of
unconstitutionality with the Constitutional Court against the Catalan parliament’s discussion and
adoption of a position against the monarchy.

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PSOE arguments against the ‘so-called right to self-determination’

Given the PSOE’s unbreakable support for Spanish unity, it was no surprise when its best-known
left leader, philosopher José Antonio Pérez Tapias, abandoned the party in January this year.
Pérez Tapias scored 15% of the vote in the 2014 PSOE primaries for the position of federal
secretary won by Pedro Sánchez and was one of the leaders of the successful 2017 rank-and-file
campaign to restore Sánchez after he had been deposed by the PSOE bureaucracy. That campaign
was won on a simple three-point program: never support the formation of a PP government; form
a left alliance for government with Unidos Podemos; and accept Spain as a pluri-national state
and amend the constitution to reflect that reality.

Late last year, at the height of the Catalan crisis, Pérez Tapias made what was to become his final
call for the PSOE government to allow an independence consultation in Catalonia. He explained
his subsequent resignation to on-line journal Ctxt in these words:
I can’t avoid it, given the heterodox nature of the political positions I maintain, which are publicly
known, including those that relate to the conflict with Catalonia and the crisis of the State. To be able to
defend them I don’t want to cause misunderstandings either within the party nor before public opinion.
When an obvious rift opens up between your own positions and those defended by the organisation to
which you belong the time has come to leave that organisation, especially when you can’t detect a
minority that shares those positions and would make them operational inside the party. I don’t see any
serious steps forward towards the goal that I consider indispensable, that of a pluri-national federal State.

What’s more, as I’ve written in various publications, I think that the crisis of the Spanish state is so deep
that we can only get ourselves out of the mire by launching a constituent process to redesign its
architecture. It doesn’t look as if the PSOE has any intention of going down that path. And yet I think
that it’s our collective responsibility to clear the way to it.

How could Pérez Tapias remain in the same party as foreign minister Borrell, a former leading
light of the unionist lobby Catalan Civil Society (SCC) and sharer of the stage at SCC rallies with
the PP and Citizens? As against Pérez Tapias’s acceptance of a Catalan right to decide, Borrell’s
portfolio might be renamed "Minister for Compiling Pseudo-Argumernts Against the Right to
Self-Determination".

In a September 10 BBC interview on the Hard Talk program the Spanish foreign minister
recognised that Catalonia is a nation but told interviewer Stephen Sackur that what the
independence movement was seeking was not self-determination but "secession", as if that were a
forbidden outcome of an act of supposedly free choice. He then claimed that, in any case, the
Spanish constitution did not allow for a referendum.

This claim has been disputed in the Spanish state by jurists not supportive of independence for
Catalonia. They argue that a consultation of Catalan opinion is constitutionally possible under
Article 92 of the Spanish Constitution which reads:
1. Political decisions of special importance may be submitted to all citizens in a consultative referendum.
2. The referendum shall be called by the King on the President [prime minister] of the Government’s
proposal after previous authorisation by the Congress.

11
Under this article a Spanish government committed to allowing the right to self-determination
could organise a consultative referendum in Catalonia and then, in the event of a "Yes" majority,
campaign in an all-Spanish referendum to abolish or amend Article 2 to reflect acceptance of the
right to self-determination. (Article 2, imposed by the Francoist military, says that "the
Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible
homeland of all Spaniards.")

The challenge, therefore, is not legal, but political—how to change the balance of forces within
Spain so that such a government might come into power. For the great majority of Catalan
independence supporters this is an impossible dream, while for Podemos and the coalitions in
which it participates in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and the Valencian Country, it is a
struggle that must continue to be fought.

Regardless of that debate, the fact that the twelve members of the Constitutional Court have ruled
against the constitutionality of a referendum simply exposes the contradiction between Spanish
state constitutionality--as interpreted by a group of twelve judges appointed by the main parties
elected under Spain’s gerrymandered voting system--and democratic principle. The constitution
as it really exists is determined at any point in time by its interpretation by the Constitutional
Court judges of the day—product of the political balance of forces that got them appointed.

Asked by Sackur why the Spanish government didn’t drop the case against the Catalan politicians
and negotiate with them, Borrell replied: "Have you heard of division of powers"? Should we
abide by the Constitutional Court?". The BBC’s "hard" interviewer hadn’t done enough
homework to be able to counter with the reality that the Spanish prosecutor-general could be
instructed to drop the case against the Catalans and that the nationalist parties in the Spanish
congress had already demanded this, but that its refusal was obviously based on political
calculation.

Sánchez’s reckoning is that his best chance of breaking the back of the Catalan independence
movement is to continue applying the stick of refusing to negotiate over a referendum and the
impending show trial of the Catalan leaders while increasing the dosages of carrot to seduce the
most recent and least committed supporters of the independence cause. In this way the tensions
and cracks within the pro-independence camp will hopefully widen between the "moderates" and
the "fundamentalists". At the same time the PSOE can blame the Catalan independence parties
for the growing presence of the anti-Catalan (and anti-refugee, anti-immigrant and anti-feminist)
far right in the rest of the Spanish state and use that threat to further blackmail them.

The PSOE position requires its spokespeople to be fluent in its "case" against the right of nations
to self-determination and this can have sadly comic results. In addition to Borrell’s BBC
interview stumble, Catalans have recently been able to enjoy Spanish deputy prime minister
Carmen Calvo‘s October 11 assertions on radio RAC 1 that "there was no negotiated referendum
in Scotland" that "in no case do democracies envisage the right to self-determination", that the
United Nations only contemplates the right to self-determination in the case of former colonies
and that David Cameron, the British prime minister who negotiated the referendum with Scottish
premier Alex Salmond, "let the situation slip through his hands".

12
The PSOE’s argument against the right to self-determination always invokes constitutionality—
no European constitution accepts that right. The argument deliberately ignores the inconvenient
fact that Denmark has conceded right to independence to the Faroe Islands and Greenland and
that France has conceded it to New Caledonia, but it is the keystone of the European Union club
of states refusal to accept October 1 as a binding referendum. It was repeated ad nauseam by
European Commission spokespersons during their days of acute embarrassment at Spanish police
bashing of Catalan voters: the implicit but clear message was that the Catalan government had
brought the regrettable violence upon itself by its unconstitutional behaviour.

The PSOE will continue to roll out its sad arguments against the right of nations to self-
determination, not just to win and confuse hearts and minds within the Spanish state but also
because it is acutely conscious of holding the frontline for the European elites’ vision of Europe
as a union of states and not of peoples. David Cameron’s granting of a referendum to Scotland
had already caused them profound unease, as explained in a September 18, 2014 article in the
British Daily Telegraph:
Even in the best of scenarios, Scottish independence poses a serious challenge to the existing order of
states embodied in the treaty of the European Union.

Europe’s order is built on the idea of stable states and fixed borders that underpin a legal order more than
50 years old, as well as structures such as the EU and NATO.

When Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, described Scottish independence as a “torpedo to the
vulnerabilities of the EU” he was speaking for many - if not all Europe's leaders.

Yes, Spain faces a separatist challenge of its own with Catalonia holding a unilateral independence vote
in November as well as simmering Basque discontent.

But, as Mr Rajoy explained yesterday, all of the EU’s leaders are concerned that Scottish independence
will challenge an international order already rocked by the eurozone crisis and a popular backlash
against political elites.

“I have spoken to the representatives of the 28 states and enthusiasm for processes of this type is nil,
because I understand they are bad for the region in question, for the state and the EU as a whole,” he
said.

“They harm the wealth, employment and welfare of all EU citizens, and the very essence of the EU."

The PSOE as defender of the Spanish and European status quo will use all the weapons at its
command to try to defeat the Catalan movement. The vital question then becomes that of the
capacity of that movement—the parties and their leaderships, the mass organisations, the local
councils and associations of all types--to resist the onslaught and turn the tide on all the fronts on
which it has to struggle.

4. The October 1 referendum and its aftermath

What was October 1?

What would victory be for the Catalan movement? That might seem a question with a very
obvious answer—an independent Catalan state—but to achieve that goal a prior win is
indispensable: either to overcome Spanish state refusal to accept a Scottish-style referendum or to

13
make it impossible for significant international recognition to be refused to any unilateral
substitute, such as an election overwhelmingly won by pro-independence forces.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe a couple of million, in Catalonia would immediately say that such
an act has already taken place: the October 1, 2017 referendum, showed a clear majority of
participants (90.18%, 2.286 million votes) in favour of Catalonia becoming an independent state
in the form of a republic.

The epic collective effort that achieved October 1 has become even clearer over the past year,
which in Catalonia has seen dozens of books and documentaries devoted to retelling the day in all
its moving and fascinating human detail. These works relive all aspects of its preparation,
epitomised by the seemingly miraculous early morning appearance of ballot boxes despite all the
attention of the Spanish police and secret service.vii

Benet Salellas, a CUP MP at the time, summarised his view of the meaning of October 1 for
Catalan society in a June 7 article in the on-line journal Crític:
[I]t is obvious that we have not experienced a comparable moment of onslaught against the 1978 regime,
neither for the police and legal violence unleashed from those days until now, nor for the explicit
blackmail of the economic powers-that-be like the banks—the "armies of finance" in the language of
[Catalan Marxist historian Josep] Fontana--nor for the clear intervention of the institutions of the
European Union acting as butress to the regime (...)

That day, a day that will last for years, everything changed and it brought about a change in the mental
outlook of an important part of the people of this country such that a return to their point of departure is
now impossible. October 1 has an undeniably irreversible character, guaranteeing that in similar
conditions the conflict will reappear because it is no longer possible to resolve the situation without
opening a more or less profound constituent process. There has been "pacification" via the use of
institutional violence, but the conflict is intact and will not be resolved with the tools of the 1978 regime
that are today, in the eyes of an important part of the population, illegitimate.

October 1 is now the commonly acknowledged turning-point in the politics of Catalonia. All
three pro-independence parties in the Catalan parliament agree that the Yes vote set the goal of
pro-independence politics—to "unfold the Republic". That is all the more the case given the
result of the December 21 Catalan election. Called by Rajoy to legitimise his suspension of
Catalan self-rule, it saw a record 79.09% participation (compared to 43.13% on October 1) and a
victory (70 seats out of 135) for pro-independence forces in very unfavourable circumstances.

So, is there a need for another act of Catalan self-determination? What is the problem with
accepting October 1 as such, especially in the light of this comment by jailed former ANC
president Jordi Sànchez that "the referendum is not a legal mandate but is a moral and political
one, and this connection is much more intense—much, much more intense—much stronger than
any legal mandate."

Any need for another referendum is emphatically not, as the leadership of Unidos Podemos and
CatECP maintain, due to October 1 never being a "real referendum" but only a "popular
mobilisation". Those who organised and voted certainly didn’t think they were just taking part in
a very big and very complex Catalonia-wide show of popular sentiment. Moreover, the

14
preliminary conclusion of the international observation team was that, despite difficulties and
shortcomings, "the process should be respected".

Any need for another referendum is also not because the participation rate on October 1 was
under a certain threshold (say, 50%). The Council of Europe Venice Commission’s code of good
practice on referenda advises against setting minimum participation rates so as not to create an
incentive to organise boycotts. If the result on October 1 had been that of an agreed, Scottish-
style referendum, it would have met the criteria of legitimacy. That was the case with the 2005
referendum on the European constitution, in which the participation rate in the Spanish state was
a low 42.32%.

The basic problem was that the referendum was not agreed and was never going to be agreed by
the Spanish state and its European Union backers. Even if the participation rate had been much
higher, the result would still not have been recognised by the major powers (although the
statements of support from countries sympathetic to Catalonia might have been stronger).

The anti-referendum campaigning of the Spanish-patriotic media also made sure that the
referendum was viewed as a fraud or "failed coup attempt" elsewhere in the Spanish state and
that its unilateral character was the pretext for not recognising the result. Institutional European
disowning of the referendum effectively began before October 1 with the refusal of the Venice
Commission to comment on the legislation governing it, even though this was very largely based
on the Commission’s own criteria. In a June 5, 2017 letter to the Catalan government it said that
"for the Commission to intervene there must be an agreement with the Spanish authorities."

The Spanish government mounted an intense and successful campaign to ensure no European
state would accept October 1 as a legitimate plebiscite, despite some expressions of sympathy
and solidarity from Catalonia’s closest supporters (e.g. Scotland, Slovenia, Flanders, Corsica). As
a result, the only legitimacy the referendum could have eventually achieved would have been that
of a fait accompli, of establishing control over Catalan territory as the first step towards unfolding
an independent Catalan state.

This is recognised as the "Kosovo scenario" in international law. The UN mandate established
over the formerly Serbian province after the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia led by degrees to the
2008 declaration of Kosovan independence based on a 1991 referendum, a 2010 International
Court of Justice ruling that this declaration did not break any international law, and recognition to
date by 111 of the UN’s 193 members states (but not including the Spanish state, Russia or
China).

The Conclusion (Part 6) of this article contains some comment on the issue of whether the
Catalan movement still needs to call for a negotiated Scottish-style referendum.

The October retreat

The Kosovo scenario was never going to materialise after October 1 because the government of
Carles Puigdemont had done little to plan for the concrete realisation of the sovereignty voted for
in a context of Spanish state repression. There were, for example, no plans to mobilise and
organise the supporters who had guaranteed October 1 to establish control of Catalan territory

15
and key infrastructure and help make the law governing transition to Catalan sovereignty a
reality. Nor did the government look to build on the enormous turnout in the October 3 civic
general strike against the police attacks of October 1.

Exiled former health minister Toni Comín admitted as much in an interview with web-based daily
El Nacional on the first anniversary of October 1. Stating that the Puigdemont government had
well-worked out plans for situations of a negotiation with Madrid, he added:
I accept—and it would be my main self-criticism--that in all the strategy that we led from the
government maybe the management of the mandate in a scenario of repression was not worked out
sufficiently...

The moment arrives, there’s a strategy to implement the mandate in a fight that we would, so to say, have
liked to be brief, but we now realise that it will probably be long...

For me at least, the conviction that the intensity of repression of the Spanish state would go completely
beyond the bounds of a European law-governed state began on that day...

We were thinking that this [level of repression]--destroying the reputation of the Spanish state as a
democratic state, taking off the mask and violating civil rights so brazenly--would be a barrier that it
would cost them more to climb over. But it became clear that the damage to their international reputation
was all the same to them.

Given such unpreparedness, the decision of the Puigdemont government to fade away in the face
of the Spanish government’s October 27 takeover of Catalan self-rule under article 155 was
entirely understandable: it was the only practicable option if the possibility of bloodshed was to
be avoided. In the absence of preparation, it was either retreat or be swept aside by the occupying
Spanish police and Civil Guard after a brief, totally one-sided clash. That would have been a
contemporary repeat of the October 6, 1934 removal of the Lluís Companys government after its
declaration of the "Catalan State in the Federal Spanish Republic". Like that event, it could well
have produced casualties.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that this result was inevitable. Puigdemont’s team
seems not to have really grasped the dimension of the challenge it was making to the Spanish
state and to the European Union as club of states. It was consequently unprepared for or even
unaware of the political and organisational imperatives that such a clash would entail.

Carles Puigdemont himself, when asked in a March 2 interview on radio RAC 1 what mistakes he
had made, said:
The mistake of October 10 [when Puigdemont declared independence but immediately suspended the
declaration to allow for negotiations with the Rajoy government]. I listened to many, very many, people
who were in contact with the Spanish government and who said, who assured, promised, maintained,
that if we didn’t vote for the declaration, if we left it ineffective, that would open the window for
dialogue because they had got the message of October 1. I believe that that was what had to be done at
that point, also because I wouldn’t be able to explain today what the mistake was. However, seen from a
distance it’s clear that the Spanish government never keeps its promises, that it plays games, that it acts
with historic frivolity, light-mindedness and irresponsibility, and that, seeing the things we now see, it
would have been correct to—it was a mistake not to--implement the Republic at that moment...

16
 I believe we would have been able to defend that position very well, because we were backed by the
legitimacy that we had acquired...

Q: What about Europe?

Europe is a space run by the leaders of the states (...) and people often attribute to us the naïvete of
thinking that these states would recognise us. I’ve said, and I repeat, that we never said that there was a
state that would recognise us. What we did think, and I still think and I believe that we have to maintain,
is the position that Europe cannot be inert, indifferent, insensible, when the basic principles of the
European Charter of Human Rights are violated in such a flagrant way in its own territory...

Puigdemont’s comment indirectly reflects the importance of democratic mass sentiment ("public
opinion") in Europe as support for any unilateral independence declaration. However, while that’s
undeniable, it is hard to see how the result of an October 10 declaration of independence would
have been any different from the October 27 declaration if it were not accompanied by a serious
plan to establish control over Catalan territory. The morale of independence supporters was
higher on October 10 than on October 27, but in the absence of any strategy to implement the
Republic in the face of Spanish state repression, how could the final outcome have been
different?

Asked in the RAC1 interview how the Republic could have been declared when nothing had been
prepared and the Spanish flag was not even lowered on the Generalitat building in Barcelona,
Puigdemont said:
Minute One of the Catalan Republic cannot consistent in lowering a symbol that for an important part of
Catalans is an important symbol. What we had been saying and what I’ll continue to say is that to create
a new country we need all of us, and we won’t ask you about your identity or your opinion or your
language, and as the president of the Generalitat I couldn’t begin the Republic with a gesture of that sort.

The Puigdemont government was also plagued by the background radiation of distrust and rivalry
between the ERC and JxCat. This tension would peak at crucial moments, and it has since
emerged that the preparation of Catalan state structures, which was mainly in the hands of ERC,
was less advanced than bravado ministerial declarations were inferring and that their real state of
unpreparedness was being kept secret from the rest of the government.

The result of this state of affairs after the vote in favour of independence and while the Spanish
government was moving to terminate Catalan self-rule was that the revealed--if largely
unconscious--character of the Catalan government’s strategy emerged: to exploit the referendum
result to frighten the Rajoy government into negotiations. Rajoy of course detected this and so
had no motive to offer any concessions.

This was most clearly revealed by the Spanish government’s refusal to accept the Catalan
president’s offer of a suspension of the declaration of independence in exchange for Catalan
regional elections, suspension of article 155, removing the police and Civil Guards from
Catalonia and lifting Spanish treasury control of Catalan government finances.

That the effective purpose of the referendum was to force the Spanish state to the negotiating
table has since become an authorised version of the events of September-October, because the
claim that the October 27 declaration of independence was "symbolic" has been adopted by the

17
majority of defendants in the impending mega-trial of Catalan leaders as their line of defence
against the charges of rebellion and sedition. Only former CUP MP Mireia Boya declined to
adopt this stance, telling judge Llarena during his questioning of her in February that the
referendum was a legal and legitimate exercise of the right of a nation to self-determination.

In a September 30 interview with Jornada, Clara Ponsati, former education minister and so-
called maverick within the Puigdemont government, summed up the experience of the Catalan
October:
My understanding was that the approach we were following was referendum and then insurrection as a
consequence of referendum. The reading of the laws covering the referendum and transitionality implied
an ability to exercise power that, as things stood then and now, required a level of control of power
corresponding to insurrection. To think that without that there would be sufficient pressure on the
Spanish state to negotiate seems naïve to me.

5. The fault lines in the Catalan independence movement

The end result of the events of October 2017—the successful imposition of the referendum via
popular civil disobedience and self-organisation but leading to the "Republic that never was"--lies
at the heart of the strategic debate and struggle within the independence movement. This debate
traverses the entire pro-independence community, even if the often sharp exchanges among the
three pro-independence parties are its most public expression.

How much was October 1 and its aftermath a win and how much was it a loss? The dispute
begins here and determines different views of what remains to be done to achieve final victory. It
also entails differing valuations of the relative importance of the battlefronts on which the Catalan
independence movement must engage: the social, electoral and ideological struggles on the
Catalan home front; the struggle for hearts and minds in the Spanish state; the legal struggle in
Spain and Europe; and the struggle for support within Europe and internationally.

In particular, the debate entails differing valuations of the status of the October 1 referendum
decision itself and the importance or not of still maintaining the call on the Spanish state for a
negotiated, Scottish-style referendum pact.

Opinion ranges between two poles. At one end of the spectrum lies the view that October 1
represented an advance that just stalled—explanations differ as to why--and that the task is to
restart the advance on the basis of the pro-independence majority won on December 27, fuelling
the remaining movement to the Republic with the support that already exists and with that which
would be inspired by a resolute offensive. The legitimacy is there, the people are there, all that is
lacking is organisation and political willpower on the part of leadership.

The argument at the other end is that the result of October 1 revealed the pro-independence cause
still not to have a broad enough social base. It also stirred up a powerful Spanish-centralist and
Spanish-patriotic reaction which needs to be defused. Hence, the fuel does not yet exist to launch
a final offensive towards the goal of the Republic, not the least because the institutions of the
Spanish state, humiliated by their failure to stop the referendum, have been strengthening their
own repressive capacity while the European elites remain as hostile as ever.

18
For this position, work remains to be done in winning important parts of the population to the
cause, especially in the Castilian-speaking working-class neighbourhoods of Barcelona and
Tarragona, which the most rabid unionism has constructed as the mythical anti-independentist
region of "Tabarnia". For that to happen, a pro-independence Catalan government has to have the
time to show in practice how life in a Catalan Republic could be better while the battle for hearts
and minds over Catalonia’s right to self-determination has to make more gains elsewhere in the
Spanish state and also in Europe.

In this dispute differences along two axes complicate reality and analysis: there’s the left-right
social axis along which alone simple characterisations can be misleading (for example, is the all-
embracing JxCat, despite including the conservative PDECat, "right-nationalist"?) and there’s the
defensive-offensive strategy axis, on which the "centre-left" ERC expounds more cautious
positions than the "centre-right" JxCat or the "far left" CUP.

The following analysis of the fault lines in the Catalan independence movement avoids using
these standard epithets and tries to lay out the positions of the various protagonists as concretely
as possible.

Roots of ERC-JxCat tensions

As can be seen from the quotations from JxCat spokesperson Albert Batet and ERC spokesperson
Sergi Sabrià in Part 2 of this article, the position of JxCat leans towards the first pole of the
strategy spectrum, often called "legitimist", while the ERC tends to support the second, often
dubbed "pragmatist". However, since these positions aren’t just intellectual constructs but reflect
different attitudes and moods within the broad pro-independence half of Catalan society, sizeable
secondary differences also tend to emerge within the two basic positions.

The differences have had a material political impact, beginning with the negotiations. over the
forming of a pro-independence government and the election of its ministers. The initial clash
came with the January 30 decision of speaker Roger Torrent to adjourn a parliamentary session
that had been set down to invest Carles Puigdemont by video link from Brussels. This action had
been expressly prohibited by the Constitutional Court and could, if persisted in, have confronted
the speakership board members supporting it with criminal sanctions.

From that moment until the final formation of the Torra government just before the deadline for a
repeat election, the dynamic between the two forces was one of JxCat nominating first as
president and then as ministers MPs that were in jail or exile. That placed the Spanish courts in a
position of having to ban them and so exposed Spanish justice as once again violating Catalan
parliamentary sovereignty and thus as vulnerable to possible future condemnation by the
European Court of Human Rights.

The ERC, anxious to form Catalan government and get the article 155 intervention lifted, resisted
this "strategy of tension", as did some members of JxCat itself, mostly within the wing of
Puigdemont’s alliance coming from the PDECat. For example, on January 22 former interior
minister Joaquim Forn wrote in his prison diary (later published as Writings in Prison):

19
 In Brussels they remain committed to the idea that the candidate for the investiture has to be
Puigdemont. (...) I’m afraid that this strategy will drag us into a dead-end. There’s no doubt the
investiture will be challenged and that will only serve to prolong the agony of 155. I believe the country
needs to have a president and a government that governs as soon as possible. That will be the only way
to get 155 off our backs. We have to rid ourselves of it. While I understand that the JxCat ticket was built
around the figure of the president and the legitimacy of the sacked government, we can’t dismiss
designating an alternative candidate because the way I see it the priority has to be immediate recovery of
the government. Every extra day under the yoke of 155 is a present we give them, a step backwards, as if
we were playing American football and losing yards that it will cost us God knows what effort to
recover--if we can, that is.

I wouldn’t want the political path we’ve travelled as a country over recent years to go through having to
dust off the "Freedom, Amnesty, Statute of Autonomy" placards of 1977.viii

The ERC position

The ERC, which had borne the bulk of the preparations for the referendum and which had also
resisted Puigdemont’s October 26 offer to Madrid, has drawn the conclusion from the events
following October 1 that the stalled Catalan Republic can only be realised through a more or less
protracted process of broadening its social base, a position codified in the political resolution
adopted at its June 30-July 1 national conference.

The draft of that resolution reads:

We must reflect seriously on those aspects that we need to strengthen if we want to arrive at the next
clash with the State in the best possible conditions. We can identify four as fundamental: (1) Grasping
the meaning of widening the social majority without mechanically confusing that with the parliamentary
majority; (2) Recovering an understanding with those social and political sectors that, while supportive
of the right to decide, kept their distance from the strategy of the forces supporting the Catalan Republic;
(3) Elaborating those aspects of our political proposal that connect us with the diversity of present day
Catalan society; and (4) Grasping the process towards independence as having a necessarily multilateral
character, into which political and institutional protagonists of a very diverse kind will intervene (italic in
original).

This approach entailed a conscious break from the approach that had produced October 1 and
October 27: winning would require more social support than that represented by a parliamentary
majority; there could be no timetable for implementing the Republic (like the eighteenth month
target set early in the Puigdemont government’s term); the basis of mobilisations and alliances
could not be restricted to independence supporters; and the whole process would be much more
complicated than announcing a D-Day and organising to arrive at it.

The ERC’s pre-conference discussion and the 1450 amendments received to the initial draft of its
political resolution revealed the different mood of its membership: this was unsurprising given
the engagement of ERC members and sympathisers in building October 1, including in the
Committees for the Defence of the Referendum (later Republic). The 79-page resolution as
finally adopted by the conference had a different name ("Now, the Catalan Republic" instead of
"Let’s make the Republic"), was 25 pages longer than the draft, with key sections such as
"Opportunities and Challenges" largely rewritten in the light of rank-and-file amendments.

20
Josep Andreu, the ERC mayor of Montblanc, explained to the June 15 edition of VilaWeb that the
problem with the original draft was that the unilateral road to building the Catalan Republic had
been pushed into the background:
To say that we are not a Republic is to slight the position that the ERC held on October 1 and October 3
and on October 26 and 27 [when most ERC ministers dissented from Puigdemont’s efforts to reach an
agreement for early elections with Madrid]. We can’t shift from positions that we all defended
unanimously to others without having a debate and a process of internal reflection...

We don’t propose unilateral action for the day after tomorrow nor in a month’s time, but the ERC can’t
renounce independence nor unilateral action. The ERC was born to achieve that in 1931 and carries it in
its DNA.

This was an important correction. Without disobedience, without hostile engagement with the
Spanish state in the name of the right to self-determination it is impossible to keep the struggle
alive as an issue that must be dealt with, and it is impossible to maintain and increase the political
price paid by the Spanish establishment. Moreover, to read the events of September-October as a
"failure of unilateralism" is effectively to give up on the right to self-determination altogether.
The problem of October 1 was not that it was "unilateral" but that it was unilateralism done
incompletely, without a serious plan to entrench the result.

The most important changes to the draft political resolution addressed the following issues:

Need for a broader social majority. The passage quoted above was deleted and its content and
implications made more explicit. For example:
Today, while the pro-independence camp has forces available to it that would very probably allow it to win
any election celebrated in normal conditions of full democracy, we have to register that the Catalan Republic
continues to be a project still waiting to be realised. And that is so because modifying the present correlation
of forces, which is still favourable to the Spanish state because of its use of police and legal repression of our
freedoms, requires us to have an active and organised social majority that would go beyond that required in a
context of strict democratic respect for parliamentary and referendum majorities. (...) All things considered,
we know that to modify the existing relationship of forces we need to broaden even more the social majority
in favour of a Catalan Republic and create and have available the instruments of power needed to implement
the republican project.

Building an active alliance expressing the social majority in favour of the right to decide. A clear
majority (between 70% and 80%) says it supports the Catalan right to self-determination, but it
still needs to be transformed into a force that can confront the Spanish state.
The independence movement has to get actively involved in processes of social change and democratic
renewal that could be launched by non-independentist sectors. Making clear its desire to build a social
majority in support of a new country, with a new, more just and equal society and rules of the game that are an
expression of the people’s will.

Building that majority would also require special attention to building and supporting the feminist
movement and strengthening ties with migrant communities:
The participation in the process of building the Catalan Republic of all these collectives of people born
abroad is the best guarantee of the strengthening of the project as one of civic and republican patriotism,
one able to be shared by all the citizens of Catalonia independent of cultural and national background.

21
Conditions for applying civil disobedience tactics. The draft document, while hailing October 1
in many places, did not take an explicit stand in favour of the peaceful, mass civil disobedience
that underpinned its success. However, the final text read:
The tool of civil disobedience must be kept at hand so as to be used, in the last instance and in perfect
coordination with the Catalan institutions, to bring us to our national goals. We need to use non-violent
resistance to force the negotiations over a referendum which, if it does not arrive in a short space of time,
we need to impose. October 1 was a clear example of this coordination between people and institutions.

Other rank-and-file amendments included in the final text were at pains to clarify what the
change in strategic framework did not entail. It did not mean that the ERC now accepted only a
negotiated referendum result, had forever discarded the unilateral implementation of the Republic
and a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (a la Kosovo), had abandoned support for the
Council of the Republic or was downplaying the self-organisation that had underpinned October
1.

The amendments also committed the ERC to prepare non-collaboration with the Spanish state
institutions such as the Constitutional Court and continue to boycott multilateral meetings of
regional government ministers led by their Spanish state counterpart.

In its struggle over hegemony with JxCat, the ERC voted to maintain its position of not
supporting a single joint ticket of independence parties in local, Catalan and Spain-wide
elections. It would have been strengthened in this stance by its successes on December 21 in
Barcelona’s and Tarragona’s mainly Spanish-speaking "industrial belt" seats, a success reflected
in subsequent membership growth.

The CUP position

The CUP’s diagnosis of the "Catalan October" and the tasks of the independence movement is
almost the polar opposite of the ERC’s. In place of the republicans’ focus on the insufficient
social support for a strategy that was applied as well as could be expected in the circumstances
comes a diagnosis centred on the shortcomings of the leadership of the independence process.

The strategic report adopted at the CUP’s May 13 national assembly also includes a self-criticism
of the CUP itself for having too much tailed the Puigdemont government. When, after October 3
it became clear that Puigdemont was trying to use the October 1 result to force negotiations from
the Rajoy government, the CUP should have moved to maintain the mobilisation of October 3.
The CUP and the bulk of the pro-independence left has taken part in the process’s dominant strategy to
date, even while considering that it was not the correct path, and despite the contradictions that this
entailed. This process is that of the institutional road to independence, or the path from one legal
framework to the next, or the liberal mirage (which more or less affirmed that democracy exists in
Europe and if we managed to vote in an equivalent manner no-one could stop the independence of
Catalonia).

Despite being critical of certain aspects, we have not disputed the leadership of the independence
movement of those who have built it with these parameters. A self-criticism is required: while at times it
would have been because of an objective lack of the strength needed to make our mark, our duty was
(and continues to be) to have an impact on the political line of the whole of the republican movement

22
 and to look for the necessary forces and strategies to do that. In many situations we have trailed behind
too much, when what has happened in recent months shows us that the CUP could lead and could have
an impact because a good part of rank-and-file independentism was listening to it: our role between
September 20 [date of the first Civil Guard raid on Catalan government ministries and other institutions]
and October 1 is the clearest example, when we showed the wisdom of the approach of mass civil
resistance in defence of our headquarters and the voting centres...

We also need to make a critical review of our role between October 3 and 10, when, instead of distancing
ourselves from the de-escalation planned and realised by the government and of having a perspective of
getting out of its parliamentarist and negotiation dynamic, a media and public silence was adopted that
favoured the deal-making and process-following interests of Together for the Yes [JxSí, the ruling
coalition of PDECat, ERC and various independents]. Moreover, this state of affairs extended from
October 10 to October 27, making it impossible for us to have a public impact in opposition to their
drive to achieve negociated outcomes with the State and demobilisation.

For the CUP, given that this missed opportunity ended definitively with acceptance of the need to
stand in the December 21 elections called by Rajoy, the task now is to make sure that it maintains
permanent pressure against the Catalan government’s otherwise certain slide back to becoming
just another regional government in the Spanish state (dubbed "autonomism"). This has led to the
left pro-independence force’s adoption of a formal stance of opposition to the Torra government.

In the October 3 session of the Catalan parliament CUP spokesperson Carles Riera told the
Catalan president:
The republican movement legitimately demands of this parliament and this government that it carry out
the act of sovereignty needed to make the result of the October 1 referendum effective: now, not after the
sentences [of the detained Catalan ministers and social movement leaders], now. And to carry out this
mandate a political act of democratic breaking away from the Spanish state is needed, an act of self-
determination that takes the step forward towards our sovereignty and begins building the Republic. As
of today, you are not planning any act of sovereignty nor do you have any plan to realise one.

Look, between the republican movement and self-determination there’s a blockage. Between October 1
and the break with the [Spanish] State there’s a barrier. And today this blockage and this barrier are you
people. And we have to get over this barrier, just as we did on October 1 and October 3. Because this
people will finally win independence, with you or, if necessary, against you.

Why has a government that was elected on a commitment to implement the October 1
referendum apparently doing next to nothing to bring it about? The answer of the CUP and other
left pro-independence organisations is that this is not due to differing tactical assessments but
because the Torra government is yielding to the pressure of big capital, Catalan and Spanish. In
their first anniversary statement ("The social struggle is the road to realising the popular victory
of October 1") they said:
The exercise of the right to self-determination is, in itself, a political revolution because it places in the
hands of the people the decision of how to organise and structure the institutions governing society.
That’s why the big firms of the IBEX 35 [the Spanish stock market index] with a base in the country and
the most powerful business organisations have moved heaven and earth to derail the process of breaking
away and to channel it through wheeling and dealing back into the institutions of regional government.

This oligarchy has had a leading and determinant role in recent events, at times in public view, when it
shifted the address of registration of its companies [out of Catalonia], and a lot more often by exercising

23
 behind-the-scenes pressure on the governing pro-sovereignty camp at private meetings in reserved places
in the country’s best restaurants. The business lobby and its pressures have played a key but little
recognised role in the lack of determination on the part of the supporters of sovereignty in government in
carrying out their commitments to self-determination and the implementation of the Republic.

The CUP acknowledges the need to broaden the social support base of the independence
movement, as stressed by the ERC, but emphasises that this cannot be achieved by the actually
existing Catalan independence movement nor within the framework of Spanish institutionality. In
a January 21 interview with Crític Carles Riera spelled out the problem in winning broader
support in Castilian-speaking neighbourhoods even for an organisation like the CUP with leaders
from a Castilian-speaking working-class background:
I think the identity factor plays a key role here and that as matters now stand a part of the popular classes
sees Catalanism as an oligarchic and elitist project that excludes them socially, culturally and on an
identity basis: something you can’t trust because of bad practices like corruption and neoliberal policies.
They associate Catalanism with the Pujolistix project, which is not a project of social integration and one
that very much maintains the hierarchies. We still have a job of work to do in relation to the popular
classes, to become credible as a project of social change and as an economic model.

In polemic with the ERC, former CUP MP Eulàlia Reguant wrote in the September 3 edition of
VilaWeb:
[O]ne of the political arguments that is most used to justify the paralysing of the exercise of self-
determination (...) is that "there have to be more of us". In the new Processism 2.0x, this approach,
repeated like a mantra, seems to be saying that we need to temporarily leave our goals to one side and
partially renounce them so as to be able to convince more people, and that this is the only way to make
them possible. (...)

[T]o become more and guarantee national emancipation, it is essential to build and reinforce the
country’s main institutions: public health and education, a public bank, the rights of the working class
and the social and cooperative economy. Let’s talk about laying down the real foundations of popular
sovereignty, which are those that frighten the most powerful sectors of the pro-sovereignty camp because
they are those that unfailingly restore the right to decide to the people and take privileges off the elites.

After sketching out the policies needed for the independence cause to become more popular (and
to better expose the rhetoric of Citizens and PSC about being "concerned about people’s real
problems"), Reguant concludes:
And here’s the heart of the problem: all these policies necessarily challenge the limits of autonomism
because they question the 1978 regime and will be considered unconstitutional. We’ve already
experienced, with the forty-plus Catalan laws suspended, that the Spanish state doesn’t even accept
social-democratic and palliative measures. We need to go far beyond adopting laws and then habitually
abiding by their suspension: we need to show and demonstrate that in the same way that the institutions
and a significant part of the population were prepared to organise themselves and disobey [for the
referendum], so too will we do this to guarantee the day-to-day living conditions of all of us. (...)

And here is where the doubts come in: if there’s no desire to challenge the bounds of autonomism, with
what instruments do they want to guarantee the material living conditions of the people? Or, said in a
different way, how do we want to become more if not by making it obvious that independence, with the
guarantee of the right to self-determination as its point of entry, is a tool to secure the social, political and
civil rights of the popular classes?

24
For the CUP, therefore, the main lesson of October 1 and its aftermath is the need to contest the
orientation of the Catalan government ("mainstream sovereignism") at the same time as unfolding
the Republic from below, with local government as preferred sphere of operations. In this
framework, continuing to call on the Spanish state to negotiate a Scottish-stype referendum is
worse than a waste of time. In the words of its May strategic report:
There’s no possibility of negotiating anything with the Spanish state that is not surrender. The Spanish
state will not move a millimetre from its position. More still, if it were to confirm that the movement is
getting weaker, it would scale up its intervention on all fronts.

CUP Barcelona councillor Maria Rovira put her organisation’s position at it bluntest speaking to
the 15,000-strong left-independentist rally on September 11, Catalan National Day:
We don’t want another referendum, Mr Torra. We don’t want another statute, Mr Sánchez. We want
independence so as to be able change everything, because it is the only way to change the material
conditions of the working class.

On October 20, the CUP Political Council decided not to negotiate with the Torra government
over its 2018-19 budget. It had previously decided not take part in a strategy discussion among
Catalan parties and mass institutions being organised by Carles Puigdemont in Brussels.

Puigdemont launches National Call for the Republic

Despite these strategic differences between the ERC and the CUP, there’s one position they
definitely share—neither of them is interested in joining Carles Puigdemont’s initiative, National
Call for the Republic (CNR). The initiators of the CNR, which include Jordi Sànchez, Quim
Torra, former PSC minister Ferran Mascarell and Toni Morral, the former Initiative for Catalonia-
Greens (ICV) mayor of Cerdanyola del Vallès, conceive the project as an indispensable political
tool for implementing the decision of October 1.

The CNR, which will be launched at a founding conference on the first anniversary of the Catalan
parliament’s October 27 declaration of independence, projects itself not as another party but a
people’s movement faithful to the mandate of October 1. Its founding appeal reads:
Catalonia is experiencing a political, social and institutional period of exceptionality, which has been
accompanied by a long and painful repression of self-government and sovereignty. The situation requires
us to define new strategies, have access to new instruments and renew alliances so as to advance
effectively in fulfilling the commitment that arose from the October 1 referendum and the December 21
elections, with the goal of realising the right to self-determination. Repression and the circumstances
surrounding the exile and imprisonment of pro-sovereignty leaders should not stop us from being aware
of this imperative.

Because of all of that we make a public and open call for all of us to define together the social and
political strategies that would allow us in the near future to achieve a republic of free women and men
within a sovereign Catalonia. This is a Call for pro-sovereignty and republican unity to constitute an
organisation for political action that is democratically radical, ideologically broad and transparent in its
decision-making and in the proper management of public welfare.

25
The CNR espouses "the republican values of solidarity between persons and peoples in order to
struggle against inequality and discrimination, be that individual or social and collective". It
presents itself as the political instrument that is missing for Catalonia to win full sovereignty.
This is a call that we address to all those who share the need to unite strategies and forces, to do that on
the basis of generosity and pluralism, putting aside personality politics and partisan strategies so that the
Catalan nation can have an all-encompassing, wide-spectrum pro-sovereignty movement. It is a call in
favour of unity to build a movement for the republic that becomes a real meeting point of the political
and civil protagonists of the movement for sovereignty.

The CNR would be committed to becoming a political home for everyone who identifies with the
Catalan Republic--left, right and centre—and would be based on "ideological pluralism, and the
values of freedom, well-being, prosperity, equity, justice, solidarity, sustainability, equality,
culture, education, knowledge, transparency, participation and civic-mindedness". It would stand
in all elections up until the full establishment of the republic and then dissolve. Members of
existing parties would be able to join on an individual basis.

The ambition of the CNR is to repeat the success of JxCat in the December 21 election in the
context of permanent judicial aggression and political blackmail from Madrid. Its target voting
audience is all those non-party and unaligned people who were inspired to vote on December 21
in the face of the threat of a unionist victory and in support of the legitimacy of the sacked
Puigdemont government. It was that huge turnout that against all predictions allowed the newly
formed formation to push the ERC into second place within the independence bloc.

To get through to that public again the CNR has to appeal to the broad activist vanguard of the
independence movement. Agustí Colomines, one of the CNR’s ideologues, sketched its mood in
July 19 article in the web-based daily El Nacional:
The people who on October 1 defended the schools and the ballot boxes were not afraid, because they
were convinced of what they were doing. The doubt that gnaws at these good folk, at the people, to
describe them in the classical way, is whether the leaders, the politicians, those who were theoretically
leading the sovereignty process, knew what they were doing. The sensation is that they didn’t. The word
"deceived" isn’t uttered out loud because some of these leaders are in prison and they have to be
defended without fail, but it’s a recurring talking point in private conversation...

We confront a national struggle that we have to resolve now and not in 20 years. The Catalan conflict
doesn’t now revolve around whether we build another roundabout or whether instead of 15% or 30% of
the income tax take we manage another slice. That stage is over, at least for the independence supporters
who don’t give up on October 1 or on October 27.

The organisation and infrastructure of JxCat’s December 21 victory was provided by PDECat, the
reboot of the formerly governing conservative Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC).
However, PDECat had to grit its collective teeth and allow Puigdemont to preselect the
candidates on the JxCat list, which after December 21 saw only 14 MPs with a PDECat and/or
CDC background elected in the 34-strong JxCat parliamentary group. Seventeen of the other MPs
were independents and three were former members of other parties (one each from the ERC, PSC
and ICV).

26
The presence of a "Puigdemontist" majority within JxCat has been a permanent irritation for the
PDECat, most recently reflected in complaints over Torra’s October 2 ultimatum to Sánchez,
done without consultation. It has also produced a dynamic of Puidemontists versus PDECat
patriots within PDECat itself. Former president Artur Mas, whose "step to the side" under CUP
pressure saw Puigdemont become premier in January 2016, is the leading Puigdemontist within
PDECat, with a view that the PDECat has no future as a party opposed to Puigdemont, the man
who is seen as the central leader and symbol of the independence movement.

At the time of writing, the PDECat leadership, beyond giving "full support" to Puigdemont’s
initiative, has given no indication that it will urge its members to join the CNR. The majority
attitude is to wait and see what resonance the CNR gets, while providing Puigdemont with none
too subtle reminders that PDECat is still a power to be recognised. It has announced that it will be
standing in next May’s elections (under the banner of JxCat which it registered as its own for the
occasion) and by not providing any infrastructure for the launch of CNR. Much of the resistance
to liquidating into the CNR in the PDECat is coming from its hundreds of mayors, often elected
by heterogeneous but conservative social bases not all of which are in favour of independence.

The strategic line of the CNR is clear and Torra’s ultimatum to Sánchez an anticipation of it:
either the Spanish state agrees to a Scottish-type referendum or together we work out how to go it
alone; in the mean time we proceed on the grounds of the legitimacy of the October 1 referendum
result.

To date the CNR web site has received 70,000 commitments of support: its next hurdle will be its
October 27 launch, which should help clarify how much support not captured by PDECat, the
ERC and the CUP it can attract.

Positions of the mass organisations

The strategic differences among the parties are also reflected within the mass organisations that
structure the Catalan independence movement, the ANC, the Catalan cultural and language
association Òmnium Cultural and the CDRs, but not in any way that simply parallels the
differences among the political organisations. This is despite the fact that the ANC and Òmnium
Cultural persist in calling on the Torra government and the three parties to again show the unity
that made October 1 possible.

The closest coincidence of positions is that between the CDRs and the CUP. On first anniversary
of the referendum the CDRs issued a communique which listed the "disobedient" actions they
had carried out (lifting freeway toll barriers, stopping evictions, protesting outside the Barcelona
stock exchange, cutting the high-speed train link at Girona station, demonstrating alongside the
university students) and concluded:
We have also wanted to make clear that the [Catalan] government is not carrying out its election program
and is not building the Republic it promised and, for that reason, we have entered the office of the
Generalitat in Girona and lowered the Spanish flag and replaced it with an estelada [flag of Catalan
independence]. We have done what they don’t dare to do.

We have sealed off various roads and logistical centres. We don’t want to normalise the situation of the
political prisoners, the comrades in exile, the brutality of the Mossos d’Esquadra [Catalan police] with

27
 the blessing of [interior] minister Miquel Buch and president Quim Torra, now that they allow the
fascists to do what they want.xi

This is why we are demanding of the government that it unfold the Republic and that between all of us
we make it effective. No more delays, we want the Republic now! Republic or resignation!

For its part the ANC, originally the most "mainstream" of the mass organisations, has moved to
an increasingly critical attitude towards the Torra government. In her message on behalf of the
ANC on the first anniversary of October 1, president Elisenda Paluzie said:
It is obvious that the mandate [of the referendum] has still not been made effective. For us it is as much
in force today as it was on October 1 or on October 3. We also want the government to move from
rhetoric, from words to deeds. Tomorrow, they will have an opportunity. In this case it will be the
parliament. Tomorrow, in principle, the parliament will vote on a motion not to abide by the temporary
suspension of the MPs who are in prison or in exile, as is the case with President Puigdemont. We would
like to see this motion approved. If this suspension, lacking in any legal basis and which violates basic
political rights, is rejected, then we would like to see parliament return to paying the salary of these MPs.

Following the vote of the speakership board not to continue to accept the four exiled and
imprisoned JxCat MPs way of registering their vote, the ANC secretariat indicated that it would
move to a position of pressuring the Torra government with public protests. The first of these will
be on October 27, when the ANC will launch a petition demanding that last year’s declaration of
independence be printed in the Catalan government gazette.

Òmnium Cultural’s position might seem to be closer to the ERC’s, because its jailed president
Jordi Cuixart has always laid great stress on broadening the social and political base of
republicanism. This, however, is misleading because the goal that Òmnium Cultural most pursues
is that of maintaining the unity in action of the disparate pro-sovereignty movement around the
points on which all major protagonists can agree. Interviewed in the September 30 Ara, Cuixart
said:
Òmnium works to strengthen the country’s broad areas of consensus and that fact makes it impossible
for us to have any road map of our own. If we did, we couldn’t carry out our role of generator of
agreements. But what we do is urge the bulk of the pro-sovereignty camp to act on the basis of
generosity, empathy, unity and a sense of state, without that meaning uniformity or having to abandon
one’s own positions.

Òmnium is the mass organisation that has grown most since October 1 last year (from 71,000 to
126,000 members, probably due to its profile as the organisation most committed to the unity of
the movement.

6. Conclusion—some observations

A complex battlefield

The battleground situation for the Catalan struggle for sovereignty and independence is so
complicated that oversimplification is almost inevitable. A year after October 1 its weaknesses
and strengths remain finely balanced, with the result that any small advance or retreat still tends
to provoke exaggerated surges of euphoria or depression within more politically disconnected
independence supporters.

28
The movement has also not yet completely recovered from the impact of what has been called its
"magic" phase, the illusion that millions of people demonstrating peacefully for their right to
decide their future would readily find support in a Europe supposedly committed to democratic
values.

A pessimistic reading of the situation would stress these realities:

 The Catalan Republic, despite the many road signs welcoming visitors to towns that are
"Municipalities of the Catalan Republic", remains overwhelmingly an aspiration;

 The Spanish state remains in complete control of Catalan territory and its police and
military could easily crush any armed revolt should anyone be so silly as to start one;

 The policy of the Sánchez PSOE government remains 99% the same as the PP’s, with
foreign minister Borrell continuing the vindictive and aggressive line of his PP
predecessors;

 The PSOE government is getting full support from the main European Union member
states for its stance on Catalonia;

 The leaderships of the majority Catalan trade unions support defensive protest action
against Spanish state oppression, but not any offensive action in support of the right to
self-determination, due to the divide between their pro-sovereignty and unionist members.
Pro-sovereignty trade unionism remains in a small minority;xii

 In the rest of the Spanish state no party, not even Unidos Podemos, consistently defends
the right to national self-determination, failing to patiently explain that the Spanish
establishment and its chauvinism is simultaneously the enemy of all of Spain’s popular
classes and all of its component nations;

 The Spanish right has been galvanised by the Catalan "secessionist menace", leading to
the re-emergence of unabashed Francoism in the form of Vox and a race to the right
between Citizens and the PP;

 The longer the broad mass of Catalan sovereignty supporters cannot see a way out of the
present apparent impasse, the greater the risk to their unity and morale; and

 The impasse also exacerbates the bouts of disunity within the Catalan government, raising
the prospect of a vicious circle of disputation, demoralisation and disconnection. The
latest official Catalan Opinion Studies Centre (CEO) survey on people’s reactions to the
early October political situation debate in the Catalan parliament points in that direction:
the highest rating as winner of the debate was only 11% for Quim Torra, compared to
57% for Puigdemont in the equivalent debate in 2016.

However, that sombre picture leaves out the indisputable gains the movement has made;

29
  The failure of the Spanish courts to get European extradition warrants accepted by courts
in Germany and Belgium, leading to their withdrawal and the free movement of all the
Catalan political exiles outside the Spanish state;

 Within Spain, the number of jurists publicly questioning the Spanish courts’ fable of
October 1 as rebellion and sedition continues to grow, with Pascual Sala, the former chief
justice of the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court and former chair of the Legal
Power General Council, saying on October 16 that "it was impossible that there was
rebellion". In this context the Supreme Court show trial against the Catalan prisoners will
turn into a trial of Spanish justice system itself;

 The mobilising capacity of the movement shows no signs of flagging, with one million
once again turning out on Catalan National Day (September 11), 200,000 for the October
1 first anniversary demonstration (in Barcelona alone), and tens of thousands for the
October 16 first anniversary of the detention of former ANC president Jordi Sànchez and
Òmnium Cultural president Jordi Cuixart;

 This turnout in the more complicated post-October 1 context is a sign that the movement
as a whole, irrespective of the demoralisation of any individuals, is maturing in its
understanding of the dimension of its challenge: the road to the Republic will be more
difficult, more winding and probably quite a bit longer. In the words of exiled ERC MP
Toni Comín in an October 17 interview with El Món: "The people are much clearer that it
will take ‘long October 3s’ to be able to advance in an effective way";

 The external arm of the Catalan government, operating out of the House of the Republic
in Waterloo, continues to build international knowledge of and support for the Catalan
cause. The Council of the Republic is soon to be launched;

 Membership of the ANC and Òmnium Cultural continues to grow and CDR activities and
structures continue to be maintained;

 The Constituent Civic Forum, an informal process launched by the Catalan government to
gather citizen opinion on what a Catalan constitution should contain is about to be
initiated under the guidance of famous Catalan singer-songwriter and former MP Lluis
Llach; and

 Despite the disputes between JxCat and the ERC, voting intention surveys show the vote
for the independence camp steady or increasing.

The best indicator of the actual condition of the Catalan sovereignty and independence cause is
the body language of its enemies. There’s the twitchiness of the PSOE, over-excited at the
independence bloc’s loss of a parliamentary majority, and its obtuse bullying in response to an
anti-monarchist motion in the Catalan parliament, and there’s the "crush them once and for all"
neo-Francoist thuggery of the PP and Citizens, with their rabid abuse of Belgian and German
judges who help the separatists. Both speak volumes as to the threat the Catalan rebellion remains
for the Spanish establishment.

30
"The" strategy?

Given all this complexity it’s become increasingly common to hear the complaint within the
independence movement that "Nobody’s got a strategy" or "Nobody’s got a road map".

This reaction is partly due to the end of the time-table driven offensive that led to October 1 and
which set the framework for tens of thousands of activists’ experience of the struggle, allowing
them to make their contribution to a coordinated effort. Now, by contrast, there will have to be at
least one more "October 1" and/or "October 3" but their conditions and timing cannot be
specified in advance. In addition, the Catalan government is now on the defensive, with the
possibility of a repeat 155 hanging over its head and no obvious, or publicly discussable, way of
successfully "disobeying"--trying to move from defence to offence--on the immediate horizon.

Moreover, such a moment may not even arrive as a result of war planning from the Catalan side,
but in reaction to an offensive from the Spanish state itself.

The result is that in this situation of stall marked by dispute among the pro-independence
organisations, it’s not realistic to expect that "the" obvious strategy that convinces a majority will
magically emerge in isolation from the evolution of the dispute itself. For example, if the CNR
has a successful launch that alone will tilt the balance towards taking a more offensive approach;
if not, the more cautious orientation of the ERC will gain. What will most help to start resolve the
dispute will be some wins—even small--against Spanish legal aggression, victories from which
the movement as a whole can draw strength and learn.

Part of the task here is to remain aware of the dangers. The Spanish state can defeat the Catalan
rebellion in a number of ways. It could work on the real frustration and impatience of sections of
the movement with a view to luring them into minority acts of premature revolt: once contained
such "rebellion" would be used as a pretext for a full scale counter-attack aimed at wiping out
Catalan self-rule.

It could draw the Catalan movement down a path of never-ending base-broadening that dictates
always dodging confrontation because "there aren’t enough of us yet" and/or "we aren’t ready
enough yet". If that becomes the default setting in the independence camp, the state really will
have led Catalonia back into the fold of "autonomism". Moreover, a scenario of permanent
adaption to Spanish state pressure would make frustrated minority action more likely.

In an October 17 El Món interview, exiled ERC MP Toni Comín made two warning comments
about placing hope in the strategy of broadening the independence camp’s base through social
policy:
First warning: (...) social policies broaden much less than we would like, because the unionist vote is
very much based on identity, is very nationalist, and there’s a lot of polling evidence that unfortunately
shows us that you will not change the greater part of this vote with social policies. (...)

Second warning: if the causes of broadening support are not as automatic as they seem, neither
unfortunately are the results. I don’t believe that the simple fact of having 60% support for the Republic
will give us a negotiated referendum. Become more? Fantastic! We always have to try to become more.
But it’s more important to do more than to become more. Those of us who are here already have to be
prepared to do more, that’s the key. If the 47% is prepared to do more things, such as ongoing

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 mobilisations, bringing the country to a halt etc, we’ll get a lot further than with 60% doing the same that
we’ve been doing to date.

These points effectively make Comín a "Puigdemontist within the ERC", a position he
acknowledges and vindicates.
It is possible to maintain political confidence with both protagonists [Puigdemont and Jonqueras], even
though at times it’s certainly more wearing to act as a bridge than in confrontation. But I refuse to get
into this kind of fratricidal war. (...) The role of the president in exile is key, because the big legal wins
and the biggest hits to the State have come from outside, and moreover these legal victories in Europe
will help the political prisoners a lot in their trial in the Supreme Court. And also because, beyond the
legal front, the internationalisation of the conflict will be one of the keys to victory.

These comments also caution as to the importance in Catalonia’s strategic debate of keeping in
mind the interrelations, always shifting, of its fronts of struggle and the danger of seizing on one
or other element as the key that opens all locks. On admittedly extreme example: if the Catalan
movement’s effort was directed principally at exposing the Spanish state in the European
tribunals at the cost of sustaining the struggle on the home front, Madrid would end up being
found guilty of many crimes (after years), but Catalonia would still belong to it.

The Berga example

The application of the competing strategic approaches--"Broaden the base!", "Disobey the State"-
-in any actual conflict is no simple matter and can only be resolved by the application of the
collective intelligence of those under attack, in a perspective of carrying resistance to the Spanish
state as far as possible but without putting the overall position of the pro-sovereignty camp at
risk.

How this can be done was recently demonstrated in the case of the mayoress of the Berga (capital
of Berguedà shire), CUP member Montserrat Venturós. Venturos was condemned to six months
disqualification as mayoress for refusing to remove an estelada from Bergà town hall during the
2015 Spanish elections: a 2012 council meeting had previously voted to fly the flag. After
initially being absolved of disobedience by a local judge, a Barcelona court later found Venturós
guilty on appeal by the prosecutor.

Venturós and her supporters, a group much larger than CUP circles in Berga, then had to decide
whether to appeal the decision: this she initially did but next withdrew the appeal out of concern
that an unfavourable court ruling could condition the creation of a CUP list for the 2019 local
government elections. The question now was whether to continue defying the Barcelona court
verdict, also at the risk of incurring penalties such as disqualification from standing for mayoress.

The solution reached, with the support of the other pro-independence parties, local associations
and people organised in the Berga People’s Assembly, was for Venturós to cease to be mayoress
formally but to continue in the position in real terms. This was brought about by Venturós first
"obeying" the court ruling by resigning as mayoress—and hence as signatory of council
documents which would otherwise have been legally invalid—but then not being replaced by any
other councillor, neither from the CUP, nor from PDEC or ERC (the other parties making up the
council majority).

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Bergà consequently ended up with no mayor in the eyes of Spanish law, leading under the
relevant legislation to CUP deputy-mayor Oriol Camps being appointed "accidental mayor" and
with the chair of mayoress now empty in council meetings. At the same time, Venturós, whose
action was backed by Bergà’s extensive network of social associations, remains mayoress in the
eyes of the social majority who voted for her and she continues to carry out all the other normal
activities of her job, while the estelada still flies from Berga town hall.

In an October 19 article on web-based journal NacióDigital ("Berga: when not complying

becomes the way to self-determination") CUP leaders Laia Estrada, Lluc Salellas and Joan Coma
drew this lesson from the Bergà victory:
What happened in Berga is a response built thanks to the commitment of many different local
protagonists, which should be reproduced wherever the State wants to impose its will on the popular
will. There’s often a lot of talk about unity but it’s precisely this logic of producing coordinated and
cooperative dynamics that allows us to stand up to the State from the municipal arena and where this is
politically most natural and useful. It is from this space that we are and will be capable of generating and
consolidating an institutional presence over and against the Bourbon monarchy. A dynamic that that has
to go with work in the [Catalan] parliament, where sovereignty is exercised so as to also develop
protection for this institutionality that we can build from the municipal arena.

Can the independence movement as a whole discuss the lessons of the Berga win? How far is it
applicable to other mayors threatened with legal sanction? Is it, as suggested by Estrada, Salellas
and Coma, the key to building up a counter-power to Spanish state institutions in Catalonia?
Some have taken the opportunity of Venturós’s formal resignation to crow about the supposed
demagogic hollowness of the CUP’s disobedience call—look, the first time one of their people in
a position of power comes under legal threat, they cave in.

On the other hand, ERC parliament speaker Roger Torrent commented on October 11 to the daily
Ara that "it’s a very intelligent option. Now, it doesn’t differ at all from what we’re doing in the
Parlament of Catalonia and the Government, in any case the difference is one of rhetoric but the
facts are the same."

For its part, the CUP calls for the Catalan Parliament to pass legislation to protect any local
government official who disobeys Spanish court decisions and for the creation of a "municipalist
assembly, formed by elected office-holders and people’s movement activists, that would allow for
the continuing creation and consolidation of its own institutionality, alternative to the present
framework of the Spanish state".

On the call for a negotiated referendum

Within the wing of the movement that holds that the basic strategic task is to resume the offensive
of September-October last year, there are many who believe that calling for a negotiated
referendum from the Spanish state is a waste of time and a potentially dangerous diversion from
materialising the Republic (as noted in the CUP’s May strategy report).

Joan Coma, CUP councillor for the central Catalan city of Vic, wrote in La Jornada on June 29:
The events of September and the first days of October are the ones that show us the road to follow. It’s
from them that we have to learn from successes and mistakes, if what we want to do is exercise and

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 make effective self-determination. I am not defending, nor questioning, the character of October 1 as a
referendum. I don’t think this is the central element, nor the most unifying, about those moments and
events. In fact, we would surely have to start asking ourselves to what degree October 1 invalidates the
demand and need for a referendum of self-determination recognised by the international community or
would make it stronger and more legitimate.

This comment raises the important question of what role the call for a negotiated referendum has
in the present phase of the struggle. Answering it requires the movement to be clear about the
period it is passing through. Here it is clear that the central challenge remains that of swinging the
balance of active opinion in favour of Catalonia’s right to decide in the Spanish state and among
the other peoples of Europe. Success on that front will at some point create a crisis in Spanish
politics and so for the other major states of the European Union and for the European Union.

For the Catalan cause, having committed to a strategy of non-violent mass mobilisation and
peaceful civil disobedience (with the ETA counter-example always a potent reminder of the
disaster of the "armed road") its fate will depend on the Spanish and European elites becoming
unable to bear the political price of continuing to reject its right to decide.

Once again, this goal will never be achieved just through the battle for hearts and minds in the
rest of the Spanish state and through international diplomacy alone—rising disobedience and
defiance of Spanish institutions and the growth of republican counter-power on the home front is
a sine qua non. Nonetheless, turning the tide against the Spanish and European anti-democratic
status quo will also require support for Catalonia’s right to decide to become a majority
conviction and so an active and potent factor in all-Spanish and European politics.

It is in this context that the call for a negotiated referendum, internationally supervised if
necessary, is not a distraction nor an optional extra but a tactical necessity. Moreover, any lessons
from the September-October 2017 offensive phase of struggle, can get misapplied in the still
defensive context in which the struggle takes place today.

This becomes still clearer from facts about the October 1 referendum to whose meaning
Catalonia’s epic October should not blind us:

 If the relative percentages for actual voting choices (Yes, No, Informal) are extended to
the 770,000 voters whom the Catalan government estimated were prevented from voting
by the police and Civil Guard aggression, the total Yes vote would increase to at most
44.09% of the electoral roll.

 Thus, only 41.5% (44.09% at most) of the Catalan voting-age public could be interpreted
as being in favour of accepting the October 1 vote as a mandate to now proceed with the
building of the Catalan Republic. This figure also assumes--questionably--that all Yes
voters would now agree with proceeding down that road. There is no way of knowing
how true that assumption is, so it is impossible to say with confidence that a majority of
voting-age Catalans would now support building the Catalan Republic on the basis of the
October 1 result.

 On December 21, 1,898,371 people voted for unionist parties while 2,079,340 voted for
pro-independence forces (the Yes vote on October 1 was 2,044,038). These numbers are

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 too close to be able to determine if there is a clear majority for or against independence.
The actual result would depend on the participation rate and how voters who vote
informally or who are neither pro-independence nor pro-union (in the December 21
election around 415,000, 7.4% of the electoral roll) would vote in a straight Yes-No
choice on independence.

 Within Catalonia, polling since 2012 consistently shows 70% to 80% supporting a Catalan
right to decide, but in Catalan parliamentary elections and elections to the Spanish
congress the vote for parties supporting that right (pro-independence forces plus CatECP
and previously ICV in coalition with the United and Alternative Left) has been between
54.94% and 57.76%. This difference indicates that some 15% to 25% of voters say they
support a Catalan right to self-determination but that it is not a priority determining their
vote.

 The majority of pro-independence parties in the Catalan parliament does not represent a
social majority, because of the rural gerrymander that gives more value to a vote in Lleida
and Girona provinces compared to one in Barcelona and Tarragona. The 72 seats won by
pro-independence forces in 2015 were gained with 47.8% of the vote and the 70 seats won
in 2017 with 47.5%. This reality was acknowledged by the governing pro-independence
majority when it decided in September 2016 to make the holding of a referendum its
central goal (the CUP had already drawn this conclusion when the September 27, 2015
election results were known).

 Within Catalonia and across the Spanish state, the mobilisation that produced October 1
provoked counter-mobilisations of Spanish unionism in the name of defending
constitutionality against the "lawlessness of the secessionists". While this was not at all
evidence of a growing Northern Ireland-style "social divide", as alleged by the parties of
the right, it did reveal that around a large minority, maybe up to 40%, were alienated by
the referendum’s taking place, had hoped that it would be stopped and that, when it
wasn’t, that unionism could mobilise a sizeable body of support (over 350,000 in
Barcelona on October 8). The polarisation was reflected at the December 21 election in a
4.36% increase in support for unionist parties, with the most Spanish-centralist of these,
Citizens, increasing its vote by 5.45%.

The fact that an indisputable referendum vote has not yet taken place is critical in itself, but still
more critical in the context of the need to confront and defeat the forces of Spanish centralism
within Catalonia. Holding that the referendum has already taken place and all that remains is to
implement the Republic and "broaden the base with social measures" neglects a crucial field of
struggle—that of winning over to active support as many as possible of the 15% to 25% who say
they support the right to self-determination but still vote for parties opposing that right.

Put more concretely, the Castilian-speaking worker, student or pensioner who supports a Catalan
right to decide but still votes for the PSC is--irrespective of the reforms the PSOE-PSC might be
able to introduce during an economic upturn—unwittingly helping strengthen the bloc of Spanish
establishment forces that will apply anti-social and anti-democratic measures when the next crisis
hits, as the former PSOE government of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero did in 2010-11.

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By the same token, every vote for the parties supporting a Catalan right to decide weakens the
entire Spanish unionist establishment—objectively good news for working people, pro-
independence or not, across the whole Spanish state.

The call for a negotiated referendum maintains the space for very necessary conversations with
hundreds of thousands of people. The audience includes two broad categories: those who do not
yet see the link between asserting the right to self-determination and defence of social rights in
general, and those who feel the assertion of a Catalan right to decide as a threat to their identity as
Spanish. These conversations are more necessary for "base-broadening" than better social
policies, important though those are in themselves and as back-up to this struggle for hearts and
minds.

Given these unfinished political tasks and the fact that only an agreed referendum can reveal
whether a majority actually supports Catalan independence, the strategy of the movement cannot
be only to "unfold the republic" and the call for a negotiated referendum with the Spanish state
cannot be abandoned. This is all the more so because it is here that the Sánchez government,
headed up by its most hawkish minister Borell, has drawn its line in defence of the Spanish and
European status quo.

If a negotiated referendum could be achieved, it would represent effective recognition of the right
of self-determination. If, despite all the struggle that would be needed to force such an change, it
still proved impossible, it would be clear to all democrats that the Spanish state and its allies
remain enemies of a basic democratic right and that the Catalans had been left no choice but to
continue building their Republic on the basis of the October 1 referendum result.

Dick Nichols is Green Left Weekly European correspondent, based in Barcelona. An initial
version of Part 1 of this article has already appeared on its web site.

i In early May, on the application of the Rajoy government, the Constitutional Court suspended the Catalan law
covering the investiture of the Catalan president, which the pro-independence majority had amended to allow
Puigdemont to be elected president by video link. The court, having knocked Puigdemont out of contention with
this provisional suspension, is still to decide on the substantive issue of the constitutionality of the law as
amended.

ii In the September 6 and 7, 2017 sessions of the Catalan parliament the Puigdemont government guillotined
through its referendum legislation and the law that would cover the transition from Spanish to Catalan
institutionality in the event of a Yes vote for independence. The use of the fast-track method to pass the laws
caused outrage on the part of the opposition, which tried to block their adoption with procedural objections and
filibustering. The Constitutional Court later found that the method used to adopt the laws—not the laws
themselves—was constitutional. Former speaker Carme Forcadell is now in prison awaiting trial for allowing the
sessions to take place.

iii Demonstrations on October 1 this year ended with a small group of people, some wearing hoods, pasting CDR
stickers reading "Republic Under Construction" on the doors of the Catalan parliament. They were probably
"anti-system" activists using the cover of the CDR’s peaceful disobedience actions on the day. The CDRs had
already called off their actions when the incident took place. The police riot squad drove the protesters away
from the front of parliament. Citizens’ MPs appeared at the entrance to parliament at the height of the action,
getting themselves photographed leaving under police protection.

iv "We’re in a Hurry; We’re in a Big Hurry" is the title of a 2012 selection of the essays of former ERC leader
Heribert Barrera. Barrera first uttered the phrase when announcing the July 10, 2010 demonstration against the
Constitutional Court’s decision amending the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy. The demonstration was the first

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 in the present series of million-plus demonstrations for Catalan sovereignty. Barrera’s phrase became a popular
informal slogan of the independence movement.

v A reference to the demonstrations over the weekend of the first anniversary of the October 1 referendum.

vi The Spanish state structure is "autonomous", that is composed of 17 "autonomous communities" that each have a
statute outlining the powers of their regional governments. This structure was adopted to dilute and downgrade
the demands of the "historical nations"--Catalonia, the Basque Country (Euskadi) and Galicia (Galiza)--in the
transition from the Franco dictatorship. The 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy is the only one that has been
amended by the Spanish Constitutional Court.

vii Available in English is Days That Will Last For Years, Jordi Borràs’s photographic essay with text. See here.
viii The central slogan of the movement in Catalonia against the Franco dictatorship.

ix Reference to former Convergence and Union (CiU) Catalan president Jordi Pujol (1980-2003), whose rule was
associated with corruption scandals and the entrenchment in power of a conservative Catalan elite.
x "Processism" refers to the supposedly legalistic and institutional approach to the struggle for independence
followed by the Mas, Puigdemont and Torra governments.

xi On Saturday, September 29, the police union Jusapol called a demonstration that was planned to occupy St
James Square in central Barcelona. The demonstration was allowed, on the grounds that it was a demonstration
in support of pay equity between more highly paid regional police forces and the Spanish National Police (PNE)
and Civil Guard. This was a legal ruse to allow a unionist demonstration celebrating the action of the PNE and
Civil Guard on the anniversary of the October 1 referendum. The response on the part of the pro-independence
movement was to announce a sit-in in St. James Square, which forced the Catalan authorities to separate the
demonstrations with the Catalan police riot squad. Various groups from the St James Square sit-in tried to break
through the riot squad lines by throwing paint over them so as to get at the unionist demonstration which had
been relocated to Plaça Catalunya. A joint communiqué by four police unions criticised the Jusapol
demonstration as "inopportune, ambiguous and populist" and as outside the political neutrality that the police
forces should observe.

xii See here for more analysis.

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