First a little context. I was born in Barcelona in 1990. Austrian father, Spanish mother. I was raised speaking Spanish, German and Catalan. English and French came a bit later. I went to a German school, and have always been surrounded by people from different places. After finishing my university degree, I had the chance to live -at least for some months- in several countries all over the world: South Corea, Nicaragua, United States and Canada.

With this background, I have no nationalist feelings at all. Everywhere I go I see things I like, and things I dislike, and I’m not willing to “tag” myself with a flag and defend it no matter what happens. Although not everything about how globalisation has taken taken place is good, I truly believe in global collaboration to build a better future. There is a lot of knowledge to share to make things work better in different fields and more and more subjects and problems can be discussed and solved globally instead of in an inefficient “per country” basis.

Nevertheless countries and local politics still have a huge impact on our lives, and there are some red lines that we should not cross if we consider ourselves civilised. Well, one of these lines was crossed yesterday and we should not tolerate it.

Was the Catalan Referendum illegal? Was the voting system robust enough? What about the people who did not vote? Is the Catalan independence project a huge a problem for Europe? Is the Spanish’s government strategy to forbid the referendum legitimate? Is it smart? What will happen next? These are all very interesting questions that are being discussed and have to be discussed much more, but they all are not a matter for me today.

Call me naive, but I never thought in 2017, in a mature European Union country, I would have to see millions of people defending themselves from their own Police, sent by their own democratically elected government:

My point is that yesterday’s violence cannot be justified at all, and no one who defends the values represented by the European Union, or any other democratic country should ignore this.

At the end of the day, I was curious about what our Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, was going to say. Given the way he has handled the whole situation, of course, I did not expect an apology, but I did not expect this either (remember to turn on subtitles):

According to his speech, the Spanish Prime Minister is proud of the implemented strategy, and he said he “did what he had to do”. Is this a joke?

My question is: As a Prime Minister, how the fuck using the Police’s full power against +2M pacific citizens can be “what you have to do”? Come on! Is someone really going to buy this?

As a EU citizen, I am asking politicians around the world, and specially the ones in the EU to openly voice their opinions about this concrete issue. I am not talking about the Catalan Independence issue, but about Mariano Rajoy’s ridiculous and intolerable ways to handle it.

Having a government using Police against its own people must be regarded as a EU issue. If Mariano Rajoy is not severely punished for his behaviour, this will set an ugly precedent in the European Union history, and this is something nobody wants, right?

The European Union is a team, and when you have someone in the team who is not respecting basic rules and common sense, you need to act fast!

I hope we can fight this kind of behaviour quickly and one more time show that the European Union is actually something worth defending, that will contribute to a better, more civilised world.