After the decision of Spanish politicians to repond with repression to Catalan society in October 2017, now comes what seems to be a tactical eagerness of the PSOE government: a plan to grant pardons for the nine jailed independence-process leaders. Namely, the six then-members of the Catalan government - Oriol Junqueras, Jordi Turull, Josep Rull, Raül Romeva, Quim Forn and Dolors Bassa - the speaker of parliament, Carme Forcadell, and the leaders of the pro-independence pressure groups, Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez.
In Madrid, some are raising a clamour against closing the wounds left after the judicial abuse of the trial by calling demonstrations and collecting signatures, and others, the supposedly moderate ones, are debating what the pardons now being promoted by Pedro Sánchez should be like. Neither side has the intention to make any changes in how the state has addressed the repeated requests of Catalan leaders - from president Pasqual Maragall in 2003 with his proposed Statute of Autonomy that was mutilated with ridicule, to Carles Puigdemont, who occupied the position in 2016 and 2017 - for the citizens of Catalonia to be able to decide their future freely and democratically.
No Spanish party has proposed anything significant in this regard. All of them, therefore, are responsible for Spain entering a tunnel of repression, from which a re-emergence into the light is still very far away today. The state institutions continue to pursue the Catalan independence movement fiercely, as evidenced by the massive financial claims from Spain's Court of Account to the Catalan government for its foreign policies and Diplocat offices abroad. All this, going back to 2011.
The social and electoral strength of independence is as strong today as it was in 2017 when the referendum was held on October 1st and the Parliament of Catalonia made a declaration of independence. This, by the way, was never annulled by the Catalan chamber. The effects of the repression have not weakened the electoral force of the pro-independence parties - nor have their internecine clashes - as they have won the elections since 2015. And that, without explaining that in 2012 Artur Mas decided to turn Catalan politics around, with the support of Oriol Junqueras, to direct it towards exercising the right to decide which the majority of Catalans had called for at the Catalan National Day that year. Surveys show that this right to decide currently has 80% support among the public.
There is no dissociation between the Catalans and their pro-independence leaders, as some would have people believe in Madrid. The pro-independence parties have an ample parliamentary majority and 52% of the vote, although the largest opposition party, the PSC, took first place in the last elections in February. Pro-independence parties will not stop being so because their leaders are imprisoned. Nor because the PSOE of Pedro Sánchez (who by no means represents all of Spanish Socialism) has decided to take the risk of a partial and reversible pardon for the prisoners, with the intention of pushing Pablo Casado even further to the right and ensuring ERC support.
Good Spaniards should admit that the 1978 constitutional regime is in crisis. To start with, because it has been shown that the monarchy benefited from widespread corruption in Spain, and because Spanish nationalism is increasingly uncompromising. The cowardice of Spanish politicians, the shadowy tactics under which they benefit from the centralization of resources and services is not only a form of exploitation of others, but has generated unequal development, has impoverished rich territories such as Catalonia, as well as feeding the longing for freedom and for self-determination of many Catalans who have opted for independence in ever-greater numbers.
The repression - which no one in Spain rejects, not even those who today justify the benefits of the pardons - cannot hold back this trend. The harm caused by the clampdown requires more than a simple measure of partial clemency. Its calls for politics and serious negotiation between the state and the pro-independence movement to jointly find the democratic solution to the conflict. Nor is any help given by the lessons from 600 kilometres away on what it means to be a solid democracy, something which the Spanish one is far removed from, no matter how powerfully its ruling class reiterates the claim when referring to Catalans from a false superiority.
It would be good for Spaniards to understand something very simple, once and for all. If the pro-independence parties are legal in Catalonia and in other territories, these parties have the right to take their goal to its ultimate consequences when they obtain the parliamentary strength that these parties have in Catalonia today. The anomaly, in any case, is that the state's response to repeated requests to agree to a referendum, as has been done in other parts of the world, is always negative.
What prevents a democratic solution from being reached is still the preeminence of a Spanish nationalism, centralist and militaristic (although now exercised by the police and judges) that has not evolved with the changes imposed by the metamorphosis in the significance of sovereignty in the 21st century in many parts of the world. In Spain, on the other hand, military uprisings continue to be acclaimed as if we were in the 19th century.