Catalonia goes to polls today
NEWDELHI: The Spanish province of Catalonia is set to go to polls on Thursday, in the backdrop of the worst political turmoil that the country has seen in decades.
The trouble started in October, when the Catalan regional government held what Spain called an illegal referendum for independence. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy cracked down on the “illegal vote”, saying the referendum went against the Spanish constitution.
He sent in police to clamp down on the region, fired the top Catalan officials and dissolved the regional parliament, and transferred all authority over the area to the central government.
The Rajoy government also set December 21 as the date for elections to a new cabinet.
There are several political parties who will contest the elections, but they more or less fall into two categories — pro-independence and pro-unionist. And neither side gets along with the other.
“There are two big political blocs — one wants independence from Spain, the other wants to remain part of the Spanish union. The race will be close, and everything will remain on a knife’s edge,” Bernat Torres, who is studying economics at the University of Barcelona, told HT.
“People are tired. We’ve been going through this for a while. There’s a massive gap of comprehension between the two sides. It’s like they have parallel dialogues. One will never concede the point of the other,” Babette Pages Prange, who hails from Barcelona but is currently based in Madrid, told HT.