BARCELONA, Spain —
Catalan separatists hold their annual march in
Barcelona on Sunday, but won’t be joined this year by their leader, whose
support for dialogue with Madrid has divided the movement.
اضافة اعلان
The annual “Diada”
on September 11 marks the fall of Barcelona to Spain in 1714 and has
traditionally drawn vast crowds.
Under the slogan,
“We’re back to win: independence!” organizers hope to mark the comeback for a
movement still reeling from the failed 2017 independence bid and then the
COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our reliance on
political parties is over, only the people and civil society can achieve
independence,” said the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), an influential
association which, over the past decade, transformed this once-minor
anniversary into a massive annual event.
But the ANC, the
region’s biggest grassroots separatist movement, has been very critical of
dialogue started between the Catalan government of Pere Aragones, a moderate
separatist, and Madrid.
It said the
“October 1 victory,” when separatists organized a 2017 independence referendum
despite a ban by Madrid, and the pro-independence majority in the Catalan
parliament “must not be wasted in dialogue with the Spanish state and on
internal squabbles”.
This year, Aragones
has decided not to attend the march.
Last year, his
presence drew derisive whistles from some of the 108,000 people who turned out
to demonstrate at what was one of the smallest turnouts in a decade, police
figures showed.
“It wouldn’t make
much sense if my presence there was used against the government I run,” he told
regional public television on Wednesday, referring to his separatist coalition
which groups the left-wing ERC and hardline JxC.
Aragones belongs to
ERC, which favors a negotiated strategy to achieve independence via dialogue
with Madrid, while JxC wants to maintain a confrontational approach.
Other ERC
government members won’t attend Sunday’s march, while JxC representatives will.
A movement in crisis
Gone are the years when vast crowds would paralyze the streets of
Barcelona, when the Diada drew more than a million participants in the run-up
to the 2017 independence bid.
Five years on from
that frenetic autumn, when the
Catalan government made a short-lived
declaration of independence, triggering Spain’s worst political crisis in
decades, the context is very different.
Those behind the
bid were arrested, tried and sentenced to long jail terms by Spain’s top court,
although they were later pardoned.
Others fled abroad
to avoid prosecution, leaving the separatists sharply at odds over how to move
forward.
ERC — a small
player in Spain’s national parliament, but which has offered crucial support to
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s minority government — says it is fully committed
to dialogue.
That hasn’t changed
despite recent revelations that the Spanish intelligence service had spied on
separatist politicians.
But the hardliners
are running out of patience, disappointed with politicians whom they see as
reneging on their promises.
“We at the ANC
don’t understand how the Catalan leader is happy to pose for photos with the
leadership in Madrid but doesn’t want to do the same with hundreds of thousands
of Catalans who want independence,” the group said.
Sunday’s march will
be a delicate moment for a very weakened movement.
“The context has
changed radically following the pandemic and now with the war in Ukraine,” said
Ana Sofia Cardenal, a political scientist at Catalonia’s Open University,
suggesting people have more immediate preoccupations.
“The mood among the
people is different now, even among those who back Catalan independence,” she
said.
They want “the politicians to resolve the problems” that
people are facing in daily life.
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