Catalonia’s residents head once again to the polls

BARCELONA, Spain — In Barcelona, Catalonia’s cosmopolitan capital, there is no sign of the independent country that the region’s former leaders proclaimed with great fanfare nearly two months ago.

The Spanish flag still flies alongside the Catalan flag above the regional government building. The square where a jubilant crowd celebrated what it thought was the birth of a new republic is adorned only with Christmas decorations.

The movement’s leaders are in jail or have fled the country after staging a brazen Oct. 1 referendum on secession that was declared illegal by Spain’s government and highest court.

But as voters return to the polls Thursday — this time to elect a new regional government in an election called by Spain as a way out of the crisis — Catalonia has been left deeply polarized by this fall’s dramatic events.

Friendships have been broken, families split. Many Catalans who had mixed feelings about independence, or didn’t care about the issue much, now feel compelled to take a position.

Gabriel Brau, a 50-year-old photographer with little interest in politics, said he will vote for the first time since the 1980s, and it will be for one of the parties that favors independence. Or rather, against those who don’t, because he finds them complicit in Spain’s crackdown.

During the October referendum, Spanish police used rubber bullets and truncheons against voters, who formed human barriers to keep them out of polling stations.

“What happened on Oct. 1 affected me in a powerful way,” Brau said. “I was thinking, ‘What if they did that to my son?’ That is not democracy . ... I don’t want these people to govern my country.”

The other side has also been galvanized.

Catalans who oppose independence previously kept a low profile. Coming out as a unionist, they say, would have resulted in scorn, insults and even accusations of treason from pro-independence friends and neighbors.

But in the aftermath of the referendum they for the first time gathered for mass rallies similar in size to those achieved by the independence movement.