In less than a week, the independence movement has offered two examples of the hypermobilisation of its supporters. Last Saturday, in a large demonstration that ran through the streets of Barcelona and this Thursday in a day of general strike around Catalonia and which, in the final assessment, can be said to have been the most important of the last decade, only surpassed by the "countrywide standstill" held 48 hours after the referendum on 1st October 2017. Tens of thousands of people walked out in the capitals of Catalonia's provinces, where historic marches took place, like the one in Girona with 70,000 people according to the Urban Guard. In any case, the general strike was not equally observed, with important impact on universities, educational centres and public services and less on establishments in important cities.
In this case, the day shouldn't be only looked at in terms of the number of people who protested, but also for the repercussions it ended up having on people's daily life: from their mobility to the normality of their daily routine. In this respect, the strike was very present through the whole day and managed to send the message, like last Saturday, that the wave of indignation over the trial of the independence process in the Supreme Court is very high among Catalan society. An irritation which doesn't only affect the pro-independence world, but which extends to all those who lived with astonishment the police repression of the 1st October, the firing of the Catalan government and the entry into prison and exile of the majority of its members, of the Parliament's speaker and of the leaders of the main pro-independence bodies in Catalonia.
And after the application of article 155 of the Constitution which was, at its heart, nothing other than the suppression of self-government. I find that, in the whirlwind of news every day, little importance has been given to one of the sentences published in Pedro Sánchez's book, Manual de Resistencia (literally, "Resistance manual") ghost-written by Irene Lozano, the unscrupulous director of Global Spain, the PSOE government's tool to counter the pro-independence movement's narrative internationally. Sánchez says that "[article] 155 was like a balm for Catalan society". Only from a position of cynicism or ignorance can you write such drivel when the consequences have been terrible in general and dramatic, unjust and painful for many Catalan political and social leaders in particular.
Between them all, they face requests for sentences totalling more than two hundred years as well as having been condemned to an unjust pretrial detention. We're seeing it every day in the trial in the Supreme Court, where the accusations of rebellion which form part of the architecture of the case are neither being proved nor seem to be of interest to the public prosecutors or the state's solicitor. This Thursday, Jordi Sànchez's magnificent testimony did nothing other than show up a very good prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, who managed to prove at most that in front of the Catalan economy ministry on 20th September 2017 a little damage and disturbance occurred. Little, very little, for 500 days in pretrial detention so far and several refusals of bail. It's been much ado for the nothing there was.