Not even the assault on Brazil's institutions has been enough for Spanish nationalism to relax its obsession with the Catalan independence movement. On the contrary, the People's Party (PP), Vox and Ciudadanos (Cs) have been unable to help themselves mixing their tepid condemnations of the coup attempt in the Latin American country with criticism of the Catalan sovereignty movement. Thousands of supporters of the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who participated in a demonstration on Sunday to demand military intervention to overthrow president Lula da Silva, ended up occupying the buildings of all three powers of government in the country, with far-rightists occupying the Congress of Brazil, the presidential Palácio do Planalto and the Supreme Court. But the unprecedented anti-democratic events did not prevent the umpteenth verbal attack being made against Catalan independentism.
In the PP, it was the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, who was first to speak out on the matter, and she complained that, if the same events had occurred in the Spanish state, they would be defined as "simply public disorder". In this way the main opposition party took advantage of the assault to criticise the sedition reform agreed between the governing Spanish Socialists (PSOE) and Catalonia's ERC. And this very afternoon, the new campaign spokesperson for the PP, Borja Sémper, asked in a similar vein if "anyone in their right mind believes that Lula da Silva in five years will modify the Penal Code to lower the criminal penalties for those who attempted a coup d'état and subverted the constitutional order in Brazil?" Despite the comparison he was obviously drawing with the 1st October 2017 referendum in Catalonia and the subsequent jailing of the pro-independence politicians, Sémper then added many qualifiers to assert that "there is no possible comparison" between the two events.
For its part, far-right Vox caused a surprise by condemning "the violence against democratic institutions" in the Latin American country. But the far-right's political spokesman, Jorge Buxadé, quickly redirected the criticism to state that they condemn "all the violence, unlike the left in Europe, and especially that of Spain". And then he made a point of emphasising that in Spain "those who committed a crime of sedition and staged a coup against national unity and the democratic institutions were pardoned". Like the PP, Buxadé focused attention on the reform of the Penal Code, and asked what mechanisms the Spanish state now has if a similar case were to occur after the general elections at the end of the year, "when the PSOE and its partners lose".
And, from Cs, the same but with greater diversity of voices. Through social media, the current president Inés Arrimadas uploaded a video of the incidents that occurred at the doors of the Catalan Parliament during the first anniversary of the 1st October referendum, in 2018. "In Spain we have examples of totalitarians who attack democratic institutions", she complained. "That is how we had to leave the Catalan Parliament a few years ago in the face of the separatist multitude, encouraged by those who today not only continue in the government, but are partners of the Spanish government and in drafting the Penal Code". The Cs European representative Jordi Cañas also compared that protest to the attack by the Bolsonaro supporters. "This from Brazil is a coup attempt; [but here] they didn't just attempt it, they went through with it," he said, adding that it was carried out with extreme violence and that it failed due to the intervention of the Mossos d'Esquadra police. And, in a show of innovation, the spokesperson for Cs in Catalonia, Anna Grau, pointed out the similarity between the assault in Brazil and the demonstration called by the main pro-independence organizations against the Spanish-French summit on January 19th in Barcelona: "Populism and more populism".