It's been a year since the Spanish monarchy lost Catalonia. An emotional and political loss after the mistaken speech by Felipe VI on the evening of 3rd October 2017 telling off the Catalan people, backing the hard line taken against the Catalan institutions and ignoring the police violence on 1st October against the Catalans. That message marked a before and after in the relationship between the Spanish monarch and Catalonia. So much so that, since that date, the six visits the king of Spain has made to Catalonia have found themselves immersed in controversy, the Catalan government has announced that it won't invite him to any event it organises and that nor will it attend any of those the crown might hold. In the latest CEO survey (Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies), six out of every ten Catalans awarded the Spanish monarchy a score of zero out of ten and eight out of every ten gave it a failing grade. I repeat, eight out of ten gave it a failing grade. CIS (Spanish Centre for Sociological Research), to avoid problems, stopped asking about the monarchs in April 2015. No one is more blind than he who doesn't want to see.
And the thing is that, encouraged by right-wing media and the political far-right, the king put his crown under threat. He bought the false narrative of a coup d'état in Catalonia, whitewashed the police violence and got on board with fake news that Europe has already discredited. The Catalan politicians now in prison or exile weren't behind a coup as some tried to say; the coup against democracy came from official offices in Madrid, suspending a legitimate government and bending the Constitution. The truth has now made headway in many countries and only the resistance of Spanish justice to listening to what has been said in Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Switzerland is keeping alive a true legal absurdity.
As a bitter birthday present for the Zarzuela palace, the magazine Time has just published that president Carles Puigdemont, exiled in Belgium since Mariano Rajoy fired him the highest authority in Catalonia, is one of the favourites for the Nobel peace prize. The US weekly lists the Catalan politician alongside other figures like Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and pope Francis, based on the odds offered by various bookmakers.
Obviously, I don't know what the Norwegian Nobel Committee could announce in the next 48 hours. But the simple appearance of the name of the Catalan president in exile on this list should remove the blindfold Spain's press and her politicians have used to mislead the Spanish public. Maybe a Nobel peace prize can be awarded to a political leader for heading a coup d'état? Obviously not! And, by the way, neither Felipe VI nor Mariano Rajoy are on this list. This isn't a slip or a coincidence.