by DICK NICHOLS
Links international Journal of Socialist Renewal— On September 11, the Catalan National Day, politics in the Spanish state suffered a massive shock: up to 2 million people (more than 25% of the population of Catalonia) marched through the streets of Barcelona shouting one word, “independència”. It was a day when countless Catalans discovered that others felt the way they did—it’s time to drop Spain for a state of our own.
Who were they? And why is support for an independent Catalonia—from 1990 to 2008 as low as 15% of the population in some polls—now running at around 50%?
This was a very different Diada (Catalan National Day, remembering the 1714 fall of a besieged Barcelona in the War of the Spanish Succession). Besides the usual morning ceremonies involving cultural acts before political, business and social dignitaries, an evening march behind the banner “Catalonia, A New European State” was organised by two new nationalist networks, the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI).
The signs that the march would be huge were clear before the day. Around 1200 coaches had to be booked to bring people to Barcelona from the regions and on one rail line special trains had to be limited because the system had run out of carriages.
Catalan politicians who don’t support independence—like Josep Duran Lleida, leader of the Catalan conservative nationalist Convergence and Union (CiU) fraction in the national Spanish parliament—decided at the last moment that they had to be seen at a demonstration opposed to their politics. Nine cabinet members of the CiU government in Catalonia said they would be attending “in a personal capacity”.
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