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The 12 separatist Catalan leaders who were convicted by the Spanish Supreme Court for sedition, misuse of public funds and disobedience have tried to portray their crimes as part of a civil protest — an attempt “to defend the freedoms of Catalonians.”
The truth could not be more different. These were not honorable freedom fighters defending the rights of “the people.” They were officeholders wielding all of the powers of the state to repeatedly break the law and violate the civil rights of their citizens.
No country allows politicians to disobey the law. Suppose that the U.K. government were to choose to disobey the Benn Act, which obliges it to seek a three-month extension of the country’s membership in the European Union in the case a Brexit deal cannot be reached.
Suppose Boris Johnson decided to ignore it, and proceeded with his no-deal Brexit. What would the legal consequences be? As the English lawyer David Allen Green and other legal commentators have argued, the crime incurred would be “misconduct in public office,” for which the official guidance of the Crown Prosecutor Service of the U.K. assigns a penalty of up to life imprisonment.
Catalan separatists have developed a classic populist narrative of “a single people” (un sol poble) fighting against foreign oppressors.
Nobody (not even the accused) denies that Catalan separatist leaders have repeatedly disobeyed Spanish and Catalan law. Infamously, Carles Puigdemont, then president of Catalonia, tweeted a photo of himself in April 2017 when he received the fifth consecutive court order from the Spanish constitutional court to desist his conduct, answering with the following text: “Today I received the fifth court order from the constitutional court. We will not stop going forward.” Behind him were proudly displayed the five court orders.
Similarly, on September 7, 2017, the Catalan legislature passed by a bare majority an enabling law that declared itself superior to the Spanish constitution and the Catalan Regional Law and allowed the Catalan government, for instance, to appoint judges.
In ignoring the rule of law, these politicians violated the civil rights of a large part (at least half) of Catalan citizens. What single-minded secessionist propagandists would like us to forget is that Catalonia is a hybrid, multicultural society. Asked by the Catalan government’s own public opinion center, 41.2 percent of Catalans said they feel “as Spanish as they feel Catalan.” Only 20.1 percent said they feel “only Catalan” (the rest were divided between “mostly Spanish,” “mostly Catalan,” or “only Spanish”).
The separatists have sought to divide Catalan society in the same way nativist populists do elsewhere. In the United States, President Donald Trump achieved power by employing an “us-versus-them” rhetoric, portraying Mexican Americans and Muslims as not “real Americans.” We have seen a similar process take place in the U.K., where the populists portray everything as the fault of the rotten European elites. But nowhere has the process of dividing the population in two come as close to the brink as in Catalonia.
Catalan regional President Quim Torra gives a speech in Barcelona on October 14, 2019, after Spain’s Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan leaders to prison terms ranging from nine to 13 years | Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images
Catalan separatists have developed a classic populist narrative of “a single people” (un sol poble) fighting against foreign, undemocratic oppressors who “steal from Catalonia.” Those who feel, in different proportions, both Catalan and Spanish are treated as traitors to their language and country, and deprived of some of their civil rights.
As Catalan President Quim Torra wrote in 2012: “No, it is not normal to speak Spanish in Catalonia … And when you decide not to speak Catalan you are turning your back on Catalonia.”
Torra has also written that Spanish speakers are “scavengers, vipers, hyenas. Beasts of human shape that, nonetheless, sniff hatred. A perturbed hatred, nauseating, like dentures full of mold, against everything that the language represents.”
In the same article, he wrote about Spaniards: “They are here, among us. They hate every expression of Catalanism. A sick phobia. There is something Freudian in those beasts or a little bump in their DNA chain.”
More recently, he tweeted: “Above all, the most surprising thing is the tone, the bad manners, the Spanish self-importance and the filthy feeling. Horrible.”
The judges’ decision is in the best tradition of democratic government in Europe.
Another long-time president, Jordi Pujol, succeeded in inculcating in Catalonia a supremacist, ethnocentric ideology under a cloak of liberalism. For Pujol, the Andalusian is “an anarchic man who lives in a state of ignorance and cultural, mental and spiritual misery.”
The separatist politicians who were sentenced to prison received fair, transparent trials, conducted entirely live on Spanish TV. The seven Supreme Court judges, from different sides of the spectrum, unanimously agreed that they violated the law.
The judges’ decision is in the best tradition of democratic government in Europe: the preservation of the rule of law in a multicultural, diverse society against those who seek to divide it and would have it ethnically cleansed in the name of plebiscitary “democracy.”
It deserves the support of all those in Europe fighting for the rule of law.
Luis Garicano is vice president of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament and professor of economics at the IE Business School.