A Catalonia still shaken by Sunday's police repression, with more than 800 injured who needed medical attention and with Dantesque images of the acts by the National Police Corps and the Civil Guard, which haven't been followed even by the slightly apology from the Spanish government, has called a standstill of the country for this Tuesday to express the anger and outrage for the state's authoritarian attitude and the state of emergency enacted in Catalonia. The hours that have passed since Sunday haven't decreased the irritation of the public, rather, the fury has spread to sectors impenetrable to pro-independence arguments and also spread outside of Catalonia. In any democratic country among our peers, the Interior minister would no long be in his post, the opposition would have brought a reprobation against the deputy prime minister, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, as politically responsible, if not a direct motion of no-confidence in the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. Only in Spain, where the longing to crush the independence movement takes precedence over defending the basic values of democracy, liberty and coexistence, is the political (with the exception of Podemos) and journalistic silence we are witnessing possible.
In this context of indiscriminate police violence against the Catalan population and the hijacking of self-governance outside of the courts, using all kinds of political and legal trickery to do so, the response of a countrywide standstill this Tuesday is completely logical. It's not a typical general strike day, rather a civil response from a mature society, the vast majority of which feels indignant after the intolerable police aggression on hundreds of its fellow citizens that only wanted to place a vote in a ballot box. It has been joined everyone from political parties to unions, business sectors, shopkeepers, students, teachers. Catalan society, so accustomed to overcoming stress tests with respect to its ability to convene people in recent years, has, on this occasion, a new obstacle to overcome above all with the swiftness with which it gave the summons. The best response to the ignominy of this black Sunday: to channel the public's outrage.
For the first time, important business sectors in Madrid are starting to whisper that "the Catalan folder has slipped out of [Rajoy's] hands" and that it's necessary to open negotiations with Catalonia. The Spanish government doesn't hear any of that, nor does it want to, anchored in its diehard position of not taking a single step back. Meanwhile, Ciudadanos (Citizens) makes evident its lack of political project and its role as yes man and PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) tries to go without being noticed. An impossible exercise at this point if there's no serious change of path.
At a time when the repression is so important and so broad and in which the Catalan institutions are submitted to permanent derision by the Spanish state, at this newspaper we want to show clearly that both the Catalan government and Parliament represent all of us as Catalans. And that, as such, the country-wide standstill called concerns us too. Because of this, El Nacional will from midnight to midnight this Tuesday only publish reports that are related to the summoned protest.