For the second year in a row, the Spanish monarchy has decided not to try and hold the Princesa de Girona awards in the city that gives them their name due to the impossibility of finding any venue in which to present the awards and has had to move to Barcelona what is, along with the Princesa de Asturias awards, one of its most emblematic occasions. It happened in 2019 and it has happened again in 2021. And in 2020 it didn’t happen only because there was no celebration at all, due to the pandemic.
The entrepreneurial foundation with the task of giving some tangibility to the relations between the crown and Catalonia, full of prominent names from their business fields, invented these awards in pursuit of their mission and the failure is obvious. Catalans, not just those who support independence, feel uncomfortable with a king who, after his speech of October 3rd, 2017, broke all moorings. To this we can add the structural corruption in the institution, which had Juan Carlos I at its apex, something that is now in the public domain and has led to the exile of the former king to the United Arab Emirates.
Today, the Spanish monarchy is seen as a hindrance and a problem by more than two-thirds of Catalan society. Invariably, every time the king comes to events organized by the Royal House, the void he encounters from the Catalan institutions is total, and the protests, although less numerous than before, persist in the streets. At this year's awards ceremony there was no representative of the Catalan government, nor the mayor of Barcelona. His response to this institutional absence was to deliver a speech that would have served him perfectly in Estepona, as the word Catalonia was not even mentioned once. If there was anything at all that served to locate the speech in Catalonia it was the king's mantra of unity and of being together.
This, on the same day that the president of Òmnium Cultural, Jordi Cuixart, denounced before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, based in Geneva, the Spanish state's repression against Catalan independence and encouraged the international organization to pressure Spain to apply an amnesty for all those suffering retaliation. And it was also the day that the Catalan executive began to speak of the fact that it is studying formulas to cover the payment of 5.4 million euros claimed by the Court of Accounts from forty senior Catalan government officials - starting with Mas, Puigdemont and Junqueras - for their foreign policy actions between 2011 and 2017. It would obviously be a powerful signal for the Catalan government and its president to make that gesture after the barbarity of the Court of Accounts.