Caputxinada in Barcelona, great celebration of the Constitution in Madrid. Political prisoners in Catalonia in pretrial detention at the orders of the Supreme Court; people with firm convictions from the same court over the incidents at the Catalan government's Blanquerna bookshop in the Spanish capital at leisure out of jail. They're not exactly two different worlds but it's clear that the majority of the political class and, to a lesser extent, the public aren't in the same place. The busy swarm of groups on the pro-independence side has agreed on a strong, symbolic measure in an iconic location, the Capuchin friary in Sarrià, which will be the site of 24 hours of denouncing and fasting with three objectives: to support the political prisoners and exiles, to act as a megaphone for the four prisoners on hunger strike (Jordi Sànchez, Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Quim Forn) and to reject the Spanish Constitution. The president of Catalonia, Quim Torra, will be in Slovenia, where he will give a speech under the title "Catalonia: from the Spanish constitutional cage to freedom".
The unity of Junts per Catalunya (JxCat), Esquerra (ERC), CUP and part of En Comú, however small a part it may be, in the organisation and mobilisation of the Caputxinada this Thursday and Friday is good news. And, certainly, it will have a calming effect on the pro-independence world, worried about the disagreement and internal fights (above all, between JxCat and ERC) and the absence of a route map. The hunger strike is acting, in this sense, like a slow catalyst for a greater consensus between the two large parties and a clear example is the agreement for the new membership of the board of the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation (CCMA) which had been on the backburner for months before being finally announced this Wednesday. It's not a minor question as all Catalan public media depends on the CCMA and the chair changes hands from JxCat to Esquerra.
That the Catalan government and deputies from four parliamentary political forces, who represent a very large part of the 135 members of the Catalan chamber, should be behind a measure of this kind puts the focus back on the enormous injustice that is the pretrial detention of the political prisoners and the treatment they're receiving from the Constitutional Court in its response to their appeals for release on bail. It's this attitude from the court trying to delay its response to put off the verdict of European justice for as long as possible which has led four of the prisoners in Lledoners to undertake an indefinite hunger strike.
In the middle of all of this, the celebration of the out-dated Spanish Constitution which has minimal support from Catalan society and poor backing from Spanish society is nothing more than a shabby 40th anniversary marked by the appearance of the far right in public life. Someone should wonder why it's PP, Ciudadanos and Vox who find themselves the most comfortable with the Spanish Magna Carta now and yet at the time were the most opposed to it being passed, obviously in the political parties of the time.
As the announcement of a new Caputxinada, 52 years later, is made, I hear Pedro Sánchez and PSOE leaders again insisting that the independence movement has to support their Spanish budget. This time, using Vox as bait. On the other side of the Ebro it seems that nobody has understood that neither do they want to, nor can they. Whoever would dare cross that Rubicon with prisoners, exiles and without an agreement for a referendum would end up paying a heavy price. And nobody now wants to sign themselves up for suicide based on vague promises.