Zapatero declared on May the 25th that: “hemos culminado la fase del autogobierno” (link in Spanish) (this is the culmination of the phase of self-government), you can even check the audio here (in Spanish). Quite explicitly declaring that he has no intention of supporting any further self-government increases for the autonomous communities, like Catalonia, and implicitly telling us what can we expect of the forever delayed sentence from the Spanish Constitutional Court on the Catalan Statute of Autonomy.
Catalan independentism had forgotten about the Statute a long time ago, looking much further into regaining Catalan independence. However, many Catalans still believed in eventually achieving a more comfortable degree of self-government through a hypothetical federal Spain.
PSOE (and especially its Catalan branch) had always fooled Catalans into believing that they wanted a federal multicultural Spain. One that respected the several cultures that currently exist inside the Spanish state as opposed to Partido Popular’s vision of a centralized, monocultural state with Castillian (Spanish) supremacy, similar to the French one. PSOE leaders claimed that Catalonia had three choices: to stay as an automonous community inside of Spain, to somehow become a state inside a hypotethical federal Spain or to regain it’s independent state.
To illustrate this, Catalan president, the socialist Montilla, declared on April the 9th: “I’m a Catalan and catalanist, Spanish and federalist, not in favor of an independent Catalonia” (link in Catalan). Now Zapatero has just made it impossible for a federal Spain to be conceived, effectively leaving Montilla without an alibi and making it clear that PSOE’s model for Spain is just the same as PP’s.
Now there’s nowehere to hide, there are only two choices for Catalonia: to stay in Spain, be assimilated and become a Spanish region (and become bankrupt and impoverished in the process, let’s not forget Spain is one of the european PIGS) or to regain its independence and save itself and, through a lot of hard work, become the rich, modern state it has the potential to be.
Thanks Mr Zapatero. We know now that the era of self-government has just started.
Related articles: an excellent translation to english of an excellent opinion article on the subject (in catalan) by Vilaweb‘s director Vicent Partal can be found here, thanks to Liz Castro.
Picture: Philippe Grangeaud