Spain’s worrying descent into conflict
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of local authorities persisting with an independence referendum in defiance of Spain’s constitutional court, irrespective of whether one’s sympathies lie with Barcelona or Madrid, no onlooker can have failed to feel shock at the violence that yesterday gripped the streets of Catalonia. The confrontation pitted region against region, national police against local, sometimes family against family, for independence is by no means universally supported among Catalans.
The fact that rubber bullets were fired and hundreds of casualties reported would be distressing in any country. But in a nation which suffered dictatorship only four decades ago, and civil war only four decades before that, outbreaks of fighting within and between different areas of society is particularly worrying. The idea of a western European democracy suddenly collapsing into armed conflict seems far-fetched. Yet there is no room for complacency. Both sides can and must move swiftly to de-escalate what is clearly a dangerously combustible situation – the gravest crisis since Franco.
The government of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy must also ensure that heavy-handed, disproportionate actions from his security forces are sanctioned. He may feel no sympathy for Catalan authorities, which broke the law to stage yesterday’s vote, but he must surely understand that pictures of elderly women being shoved to the floor by black-helmeted police in full riot gear will only bring new support to those calling for independence.
When tempers have cooled, there is room to find consensus. There is scope for greater Catalan autonomy that both sides can live with. But other, deeper, causes of resentment must also be addressed. In a nation devastated by youth unemployment, Catalans are tired of – as they see it – subsiding the rest of the Spain with their own region’s more dynamic economy. And beyond Spain’s borders, this is a crisis too for the European Union, whose response yesterday was as slow and unconvincing as it always seems to be on big issues, from migration to propping up the euro. A prolonged and worsening rift between Barcelona and Madrid risks being a bigger crisis for the EU than Brexit. Its officials lost no time sounding off on our referendum vote. Where’s their response to civil conflict in Spain?