Spanish PM accuses Catalan president of ‘encouraging radicals’
The Guardian, UK:
The Spanish government has accused the Catalan president of “encouraging radicals” after a day of protests to mark the first anniversary of the region’s unilateral independence referendum ended with riot police charging demonstrators outside the Catalan parliament. About 180,000 people were estimated to have gathered in Barcelona on Monday to commemorate the vote and show their support for Catalan independence, many of them carrying banners reading “1 October, no forgiving, no forgetting”.
During the peaceful demonstrations city streets, motorways and a high-speed rail line were blocked, and activists attempted to surround the Catalan parliament and the Barcelona headquarters of the Spanish national police. Catalonia’s nationalist president, Quim Torra, had praised those undertaking direct action earlier on Monday, urging them to “keep up the pressure”.
The Catalan police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, said 30 of its officers were injured on Monday night as they tried to stop protesters forcing their way into the regional parliament and demonstrating outside the police HQ.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, urged Torra to rein in those responsible for the violence. “Catalan politics has to come back to the Catalan parliament,” he tweeted on Tuesday morning.
“President Torra needs to fulfil his obligations and not jeopardise the political return to normality by encouraging radicals to besiege the institutions that represent all Catalans. Violence is not the answer.”
The scenes of unrest will be damaging for the Catalan independence movement, which has always prided itself on being peaceful and democratic – even in the face of the violence used by Spanish police to prevent the referendum.
But with the movement increasingly divided and political progress limited, its radical sectors are growing impatient at their leaders’ failure to deliver the republic they promised and some have called for Torra to resign.
The former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium after the Spanish government sacked him and his cabinet for staging the referendum, was among the first to criticise the masked activists who had tried to enter parliament.
“If they’re wearing hoods, they aren’t 1 October people,” he tweeted. “If they use violence, they aren’t 1 October people. We did it with our faces uncovered and in a peaceful way. That is how, a year ago, we overcame an authoritarian state.”
Puigdemont’s former vice-president, Oriol Junqueras – who has been in custody, awaiting trial for almost a year – also called on pro-independence Catalans to remain peaceful in their protests.
“The 1 October taught us that truncheons and blows are always the worst solution and cannot be our way,” he wrote on Twitter. “We still have open wounds, we are people of peace and our is, and always has been, a peaceful movement.”