Catalonia ‘will split from Spain within days’
The Catalan leader has said the region will declare independence from Spain in a matter of days. Carles Puigdemont spoke after an intervention from King Felipe VI, who said Catalan leaders had put themselves “outside the law”. Protests took place against the police crackdown on Sunday’s vote.
Hannah Strange
Barney Henderson CATALONIA will declare independence from Spain “in a matter of days”, the region’s leader said last night, in what was a direct challenge to Madrid.
Carles Puigdemont was speaking less than an hour after a rare intervention from Felipe VI, the Spanish king, who stated Catalan leaders had put themselves “outside the law” and that last Sunday’s independence referendum had been illegal.
Mr Puigdemont, in his first interview since the vote and the violence that surrounded it, said that his government would “act at the end of this week or the beginning of next”.
“We will probably do this when we have the votes in from abroad, at the end of this week or thereabouts,” he told the BBC.
The regional leader said that, were the Spanish government to intervene, it would be “an error which changes everything”. Felipe VI earlier made a televised emergency speech calling on Catalan leaders to end their “inadmissible disloyalty” to the state.
As thousands protested in Catalonia over Sunday’s police crackdown on the illegal independence referendum, he vowed that the country would survive this “situation of extreme gravity”.
He accused the Catalan government of endangering the stability of the entire nation and insisted the powers of the state would ensure “the constitutional order”. A union of Spain’s Guardia Civil meanwhile called for reinforcements in Catalonia, accusing
‘Right now Catalonia is like the Basque Country in 1981’
Madrid of abandoning it to harassment it said it had not seen since 1981 – the heyday of Eta in the Basque country.
The Union of Guardia Civil Officers said members were being “harassed, manipulated and vilified by the citizens that they serve”.
Hundreds of National Police and Guardia Civil say they had been forced to abandon Catalan hotels by protesting residents, or ejected by hotel managers. This was “an abuse”, the union said, that “would not go unpunished”.
In Barcelona, thousands descended on national police headquarters, bombarding officers with paper planes during a general strike that brought Catalonia to a standstill. Some 700,000 people took to Barcelona’s streets yesterday, city police said. Protesters turned the city centre into a sea of Catalan independence flags. Other towns and cities in the region followed suit.
Across Catalonia, protesters blocked roads, halted transport and closed businesses in a strike which the business group CECOT said had recorded around 88 per cent participation.
There were also protests by National Police unions outside stations across Spain, denouncing the “persecution” of officers deployed to Catalonia. Five unions called on the Spanish interior ministry to take “urgent and effective measures” to guarantee their safety. “Right now Catalonia is like the Basque Country in 1981,” the Union of Guardia Civil Officers said in a blistering statement which claimed members had been abandoned by government inaction and betrayed by disloyal Catalan police, the Mossos d’esquadra.