BARCELONA
— The standoff over Catalonia’s independence drive has now reached a
sobering moment for Spain with the central government’s announcement
this weekend that it would take the drastic step of removing the region’s secessionist leaders.
The
situation probably never had to come to this extreme point, but now
that it has, there is plenty of blame to share — and potentially worse
pitfalls ahead on what amounts to a precarious and deeply uncertain path
for a modern European democracy.
In
announcing his emergency measures on Saturday, Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy took a backhanded slap at his chief antagonist in the dispute,
Carles Puigdemont, the leader of Catalonia, a region where, he said,
“things can’t be done worse.”
But
analysts say that Mr. Rajoy, too, shares the blame for allowing the
conflict to spin dangerously out of control and that the remedy he has
chosen is by no means assured to be a cure.
The
current crisis over Catalonia’s status is the result of years of
miscalculations all around, which have now left not only Catalans but
all Spaniards facing a grave challenge to the democratic consensus of
the country.
“You
need mistakes on both sides to get entangled in such a difficult and
undesirable situation,” said Pablo Simón, a politics professor at the
Carlos III University in Madrid.
Catalan
separatists have been flouting Spain’s Constitution, he argued, but
“the central government could have searched for political dialogue and
really reached out to the more moderate Catalans.”
“Between
fiercely defending the status quo in Spain and claiming the right to
self-determination,” Mr. Simón added, “there are a lot of gray areas
that have simply been left unexplored.”
Separatism
has century-old roots in Catalonia, a region that has its own culture
and language. It was one of the factors that plunged Spain into a civil
war in the 1930s that was then followed by a lengthy dictatorship under
Gen. Francisco Franco.
But
after Franco’s death in 1975, Catalonia endorsed Spain’s democratic
Constitution. Working hand in hand with politicians in Madrid,
conservative politicians in Catalonia acted as a buffer against smaller
parties advocating secessionism.
Still,
the desire for a distinct identity was not slaked. Catalans tried to
finesse greater autonomy for themselves, striking a deal in 2006 that
was approved in a Catalan referendum — as well by both Catalan and
Spanish lawmakers — and one that might have forestalled the current
crisis over yet more extreme demands.
But
Spain’s constitutional court rejected part of that text in 2010 after
Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party had campaigned fiercely against it.
In
each and every subsequent round of the conflict, Mr. Rajoy and Mr.
Puigdemont have both raised the stakes and boxed themselves into a
corner by making irreconcilable pledges.
No
small amount of the momentum that thrust the country into crisis was
the desire to save face by both men, who were playing to vastly
different political constituencies.
Above
all, Mr. Rajoy could not afford to appear weak. In his decisions, he
was looking beyond Catalonia at the rest of Spain, where a firm stance
has allowed him to reclaim a national leadership that was seriously put
at risk in 2016, following two inconclusive national elections amid
major corruption scandals afflicting his governing Popular Party.
Catalan
secessionism also allowed Mr. Rajoy to rope in the main opposition
Socialist party into a shared commitment to defend Spanish unity.
Mr.
Puigdemont, on the other hand, gained by playing to the home crowd with
promises of independence that always amounted to castles in the air, in
a European Union committed to defending its member states against any
rebellion by one of the Continent’s regions.
This dynamic steadily widened the gap between the two leaders.
A
month ago, Mr. Rajoy promised that Catalonia would never hold an
illegal referendum on independence, while Mr. Puigdemont told Catalan
voters that they would.
On
Oct. 1, almost 2.3 million voters defied a Spanish police crackdown to
vote overwhelmingly for independence, in a referendum that was held
without legal guarantees and was boycotted by most Catalan citizens
opposed to secession.
After the referendum, Mr. Puigdemont and Mr. Rajoy engaged in a game of chicken, exchanging ultimatums.
Then
on Saturday, Mr. Rajoy set in motion what Ernesto Ekaizer, a
Madrid-based journalist, described as “a bulldozer” to quash
secessionism.
By invoking Article 155
of the Spanish Constitution, Mr. Rajoy now intends to remove Mr.
Puigdemont and other separatist leaders from office, and call new
elections within six months.
Article
155, a vaguely worded provision in the Constitution that has never
before been tested, in effect allows the central government to strip the
autonomy of a region that is “seriously prejudicing the general
interests of Spain.”
Writing
on Sunday in Ara, a Catalan separatist newspaper, Mr. Ekaizer warned
that Mr. Rajoy’s intervention could backfire and “won’t do anything more
than make the situation more serious.”
Indeed,
the path ahead in such a scenario is treacherous. Not least, Catalans
have already voted for a regional Parliament where a majority of
lawmakers support secession, even without so far winning a majority of
the votes in the region. There is not much reason to believe the outcome
of a new vote would be different.
Mr.
Rajoy and the Spanish courts may be tempted to ban hard-line separatist
parties and their politicians. But the impulse may only lead them
further down a path that Catalans see as increasingly repressive, as
Madrid attempts to get the lawmakers it wants in Catalonia, not the ones
it has.
Mr.
Rajoy is likely to get approval on Friday for his emergency measures
from the Spanish Senate, where his conservative party holds a majority.
Separately,
the Catalan Parliament is set to meet this week to review what Mr.
Puigdemont described as Mr. Rajoy’s decision to “eliminate our
self-government and our democracy.”
While the chasm between both sides is wide, it may not be unbridgeable.
Mr.
Puigdemont could still forestall the application of Article 155 if he
decides to call new elections himself, pre-empting Mr. Rajoy.
Alternately,
he could get his separatist lawmakers to vote for a unilateral
declaration of independence, as he recently threatened.
“We’re
reaching the end of a poker game in which both players have now shown
their trump cards but not actually put them on the table,” said Antón
Costas, an economics professor at the University of Barcelona.
“So
however bad things look, there is still a final opportunity to have
neither a declaration of independence nor Article 155,” he said.
But
such an off-route may easily be passed given the speed of Catalonia’s
crisis. With each missed opportunity to defuse the dispute, the gulf
between the sides only widens.
In
2012, coinciding with the global financial crisis and the meltdown of
Spain’s banking sector, grievances over the failure to gain greater
autonomy turned instead into Catalan demands for a better fiscal deal
for the prosperous region, which Mr. Rajoy rejected.
That
rebuff pushed Catalonia’s conservative government to embrace an
independence project whose appeal on the street grew. Even after Spain
came out of recession in late 2013, the independence movement was in
full flow.
In
defiance of Spain’s courts and government, Catalonia held a nonbinding
independence vote in 2014 that was followed by regional elections in
2015, in which an unwieldy alliance of separatist parties won most seats
in the Catalan Parliament, but only 48 percent of the vote.
Since
then, Mr. Puigdemont has used Mr. Rajoy’s stonewalling as a reason to
pursue his statehood project unilaterally, under self-made Catalan laws,
rather than those of Spain.
Mr.
Rajoy didn’t negotiate earlier because he probably assumed that
“demands for independence were linked to economic problems and would
evaporate once the crisis was over,” said Mr. Simón, the politics
professor.
Now,
Mr. Rajoy is committed to using the “logical tool” of Article 155, even
if taking charge of Catalonia is “a high-risk operation, which can
provoke disobedience by civil servants and peaceful resistance by
citizens,” Mr. Simón added.
Still,
Mr. Rajoy has won significant cross-party backing for his strategy in
Catalonia, said Luis Garicano, a leading member of the center-right
Ciudadanos party that has been a staunch ally of Mr. Rajoy in opposing
Catalan secessionism.
“It’s
never good news that things should get this far, but what is very, very
good news is that there is a lot of unity among the constitutional
forces, especially with the Socialists,” Mr. Garicano said.
“We
can’t know for sure what comes next,” Mr. Garicano added. “But the
worse way would have been if Mr. Rajoy had now tried to act very
minimally and then still have failed.”
