SPAIN Vote anniversary renews tensions in restive region
MADRID — Catalan activists on Monday observed the anniversary of their disputed independence referendum by blocking train tracks and roads across Spain’s northeastern region, underscoring how charged the conflict over separatism remains.
Separatists blocked the tracks of the high-speed train that links Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, to the city of Girona to the north. They also cut off highways, as well as the most important roads that cross Barcelona. In Girona, they broke into a government building to replace the Spanish flag with the separatist Catalan flag. Thousands of students took to the streets of Barcelona.
A year after the referendum, Catalan society remains deeply split over whether the region should have been allowed to hold the vote, and some Catalan elected officials who defied the central government remain in jail or in self-imposed exile. The political deadlock shows no sign of ending, even though the political leadership has recently changed in both Madrid and Barcelona.
Last year, under Catalonia’s regional president, Carles Puigdemont, the region’s separatist government forged ahead with the Oct. 1 independence referendum, even though it had been declared illegal by Spain’s courts and the central government, which urged voters not to participate.
The Catalan police force refused to intervene to prevent the vote, so the government in Madrid, headed by Mariano Rajoy, then the prime minister, used 10,000 police officers who had been sent from other parts of the country to disrupt the referendum. They wielded batons and fired rubber bullets in an attempt to close down polling stations and disperse voters as the balloting descended into chaos.
Rajoy had promised to stop the referendum, but his hardline approach failed to prevent voting from taking place, though the result was declared null and void by Madrid. With anti-secession voters heeding his call to boycott the referendum, the proposal to create an independent Catalan republic won an overwhelming majority of the votes cast.
Separatist lawmakers used the result to make a botched declaration of independence, and the central government responded by ousting the separatist leaders and imposing direct rule over Catalonia for several months.
In June, Quim Torra took office as regional leader of Catalonia, vowing to pursue the separatist agenda of Puigdemont, who is living in Belgium to avoid a Spanish arrest warrant. But Torra has not offered any specific plan to put his region back on the road toward independence.
A new Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, has offered to return to political dialogue. But he has struggled to alter the situation in Catalonia.