Political perspective

Catalonia’s ‘kangaroo referendum’ leaves Spain in poisonous gridlock

Madrid will not consent to secession, Catalonia remains intent on tribal insurrection.

Catalan police officers 'Mossos d'Esquadra' surround a group of far-right protesters waving a Spanish flag on October 01, 2017 in Barcelona | Cesar Manso/AFP via Getty Images

Carles Puigdemont, the Nigel Farage of the Catalans, got his ugly way October 1.

The president of the autonomous regional government of Catalonia finished the day as he had always intended, by heaping scorn on the Spanish state. Amid scenes of tumult and understandably robust police action — which turned swiftly into separatist propaganda in Twitter’s Wonderland — his government held its unlawful referendum.

This was a kangaroo referendum. There is no other way to describe an exercise where voters could print ballots at home and vote at any polling booth in all of Catalonia without having to worry about their names appearing on an authenticated voters’ roll. If there were ever a Platonic ideal of a riggable, manipulable exercise in voting, it was this separatist simulacrum of democracy, designed to ensure the only result possible was a majority vote for secession.

Even before the tarnished votes were counted, Puigdemont declared “the citizens of Catalonia have earned the right to have an independent state.” These are wily words, for they foreclose any debate on the outcome of the referendum while stopping short of an actual assertion of independence. It is only a matter of time before such an assertion is made. The Spanish government will not, of course, tolerate a unilateral declaration of independence when it comes — nor should it.

So, we have a poisonous gridlock in Spain, with neither an exasperated Madrid nor the extravagantly intransigent Catalan separatists willing to budge from their positions. And yet, the fact both sides are equally unbudging does not mean they are equally endowed with moral or political virtue. The Spanish state has the law on its side, plus an unblemished record of conciliatory democracy since the establishment in 1978 of the country’s democratic, post-Franco constitution. Catalonia, and the Catalans, have had every facet and trapping of autonomy they could reasonably wish for. The only concessions that are left to be made by Madrid are symbolic ones. Spain is already a remarkably decentralized state.

There can be no doubt an independent Catalonia would start to nibble at the Catalan parts of France.

No one should be surprised by what happened in Catalonia on October 1.

The barricades at polling stations were part of the political mise-en-scène of the Catalan separatists, essential stagecraft for the theater that was to ensue. They were an invitation to the Spanish national Guardia Civil to intervene; and inevitably, the guardias did, in an effort to enforce the rule of law (especially after numerous examples of dereliction of duty by the autonomous Catalan police). The ensuing scenes were broadcast as a David-versus-Goliath contest by gullible foreign television channels — and painted in the most lurid hues by newspapers such as the Guardian, whose reporting and editorializing has been execrably simplistic and pro-separatist. The Guardian is true to type in these matters: the newspaper has yet to meet a “victim” it could not embrace.

The prize for the most irresponsible reaction to the Catalan vote (and its accompanying disorder on the streets) goes to Charles Michel, the prime minister of Belgium, one of Europe’s most dysfunctional states. Unlike the leaders of other European Union countries — who refrained from intervening in the internal affairs of a fellow EU state — Michel took to Twitter to say, “Violence can never be the answer! We condemn all forms of violence and reaffirm our call for political dialogue. #CatalanReferendum #Spain.”

Michel’s tweet was embraced with alacrity by the Catalan separatists, who took it as an endorsement of their narrative — that there had been a brutal crackdown on pacifist Catalans who were doing no more than exercising a democratic right, and that the Guardia Civil lacked the legitimacy to restore order and the rule of law in Catalonia. I would be flabbergasted if the Spanish government does not send Michel a sturdy rebuke, instructing him to keep his roving Walloon eye on Flanders. (The French government might consider doing so, too: There can be no doubt an independent Catalonia would start to nibble at the Catalan parts of France.)

What next? Since Spain will not consent to an amputation of itself — and since the EU (Michel excepted) has better sense than to stoke a separatist blaze lest it spread to other lands — there is no option but to find a way to keep Spain intact without bloodshed on the streets of Catalonia. A second Spanish Civil War still seems a far-fetched prospect: after all, we are dealing with a political disagreement within an advanced Western democracy that is part of a union of European democracies. Even the basest tribal disagreements — and the Catalan separatists are tribal to the core — are resolved in places like these by negotiation. Madrid will have to get inventive and find a way to buy time as well as goodwill in Catalonia.

In the meantime, Spain’s democracy must continue to be as it is: firm, fair, constitutional … and Spanish.

The downside of a tribal insurrection is that reason plays only a part in any resolution. Spain will need to counter Catalonia’s separatist theater with some theater of its own: a grand constitutional conference, perhaps, at which representatives of every one of the country’s 17 autonomous regions participate on an equal footing. The aim: To find ways to “improve” the constitution so as to take account of everyone’s misgivings. The conference must start with a firm bottom line: that Spain remains united under any circumstance. All else is open for discussion. Let the talking begin, and let nothing be done in haste except the talking.

In the meantime, Spain’s democracy must continue to be as it is: firm, fair, constitutional … and Spanish.

Tunku Varadarajan, a former Madrid bureau chief for The Times of London, is contributing editor at POLITICO and the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

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