In the eye of an authentic hurricane, with damages that have still not been fully assessed after Monday's tempestuous parliamentary session, not only within the Catalan government, but also in the relations between JxCat and ERC and on the election calendar as well, the Catalan chamber experienced, just 24 hours later, a day of calm, tension, highly intense emotion and, it must be said, of tribute to the six members of the government of Catalonia unjustly imprisoned, sentenced by the Supreme Court to decades of jail. Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Turull, Raül Romeva, Quim Forn, Josep Rull and Dolors Bassa have spent a total of 6,446 nights in prison so far and none of them have yet been granted a single prison leave due to the magnitude of their sentences.
They arrived in police vans and returned the same way to the prisons of Lledoners and Puig de les Basses; it was all too fast, sad and unjust. Not even the applause of MPs and parliamentary staff as they entered and departed was enough to dissipate a certain bittersweet taste among those of us who contemplated it during those brief hours of their freedom. Different, of course, to how the six political prisoners themselves experienced it. One of them, after speaking, commented on the importance of returning to Parliament and the contentment of those hours in the Catalan chamber, having savoured the time with great enthusiasm. Not a single complaint, not even of the fact that they were accompanied at all times by police officers who were surveilling them. But their composure and their bravery, as well as their compelling explanations, gave meaning to a parliamentary session which Ciudadanos, PSC and PP, the parliamentary foundation for that terrible application of article 155, preferred to avoid, either out of shame or rudeness or a wish to save themselves some discomfort.
The presence of the imprisoned members of the Catalan government in Parliament was due to their appearance in the commission studying the consequences of the application of 155. Also, due to the devastating impact on the different government departments, with the very serious consequences that resulted from the paralysis of the administration after the dismissal of the entire cabinet and the suspension of Catalonia's self-government. As the testimonies of Junqueras, Turull, Romeva, Forn, Rull and Bassa progressed, it became clear why the Spanish state had sought to blank out the independence movement and annihilate a political generation. The state, however, failed; the calculation that it would take power via a unionist government was misguided, and the Catalan independence movement repeated its parliamentary majority on December 21st, 2017.
But that clear victory at the polls, and humiliation for the state - a state with king Felipe VI visibly at its head, after actively placing himself there with his speech on October 3rd - surely would have been managed differently by the government which was in exile and in prison. Instead, a new generation had to be improvised to take the controls as best as it could. And politics, like all trades, needs years of experience and knowledge. That 2017 government had reached the exact point of readiness and leadership of Catalan society that enabled it to carry out the referendum of 1st October, only derailed through the use of force by the police and the courts.
That after so many nights of imprisonment and such a plainly unjust sentence, no recrimination should come out of their mouths, and their faces should easily break into smiles, shows what they are made of. And how necessary they still are to the crossroads at which Catalonia finds itself.