Beautiful Barcelona is a Sovereigntist Stronghold

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

Last month I spent some time in what, to my mind, is the cleanest, loveliest and most orderly city in Europe – Barcelona.

There’s so much more to see besides Antoni Gaudi’s fantastic architectural marvels, including his magnificent Church of the Sagrada Familia.

Most tourists are less aware of the city’s rich left-wing history; it was a stronghold of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and one of the last to fall to General Francisco Franco’s forces. It held out until Jan. 26, 1939.

Although Franco died in 1975, only in 2011 were the last monuments to his victory torn down in Barcelona.

There are walking tours of civil war sites. One of them, using George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, allows you to discover places that you may not find on your own.

It covers the 1936 People’s Olympiad; the city’s anarchist and socialist militias; revolutionary, Communist and Francoist violence; the Italian bombing of Barcelona; and final defeat.

Spain’s second-largest city, Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, the autonomous Spanish region that is now home to a growing sovereigntist movement. This is something I deal with in a course on ethnic nationalism that I teach at UPEI.

In Barcelona’s municipal election, held on May 26, Ernest Maragall, running under the banner of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Sovereigntists coalition, came first, ahead of the incumbent mayor, Ada Colau, a former housing activist.

France’s former prime minister Manuel Valls, who was born in the city and holds Spanish citizenship, came in a distant fourth, despite the banners advertising his candidacy which we saw all over the city.

The election was seen as a bellweather for the Catalan secessionist movement, almost two years after Catalonia was the scene of a failed attempt to secede from Spain, when separatist leaders who ran the region went ahead with an independence referendum despite a court ban.

In a tense vote held on Oct. 1, 2017 just over 40 per cent of Catalans made it to the polls, despite Madrid’s attempts to disrupt the referendum; 92 per cent said “yes” to nationhood.

That was followed by a declaration of independence before Spain’s then prime minister removed the Catalan government from office.

Spain invoked a part of its constitution that allowed direct rule over the region, removing the president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, and charging him and another dozen or so politicians with crimes against the state.

Puigdemont has been living in Brussels to avoid prosecution in Spain. But ERC leader Oriol Junqueras, who was Catalonia’s vice-president at the time, is currently in jail as the trial before the Spanish Supreme Court over his and other politicians’ role in the secession bid continues.

Spanish prosecutors want to sentence Junqueras to 25 years in prison on charges of rebellion and other crimes.

Four of the Catalan leaders on trial -- all members of Puigdemont’s Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT) – recently stated that separatists should be more flexible about working with other Spanish parties as long as those groups refuse to rule out an independence referendum as a “possible solution” for the region.

Meanwhile, Puigdemont, along with two other Catalan nationalists, was elected to the European Parliament in Spanish-wide elections held on the same day as the Barcelona election.

Their election is likely to be followed by a legal dispute over whether indicted Catalan separatists can seek European parliamentary immunity after winning their seats. So far this has been denied.

On May 29, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on Spain to release three of the jailed Catalan separatist leaders, including Junqueras, who have been denied bail while facing trial. Madrid refused.

A day earlier, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously rejected a case brought by Catalan politicians alleging Spain’s constitutional court violated their rights by blocking a session in the regional parliament at the height of the secession crisis.

There’s a Canadian angle to the story: in April Ottawa denied entry into Canada for Puigdemont, the night before he was to fly to Quebec for a tour sponsored by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, which advocates for Quebec’s independence.