Insight
Crunch time in Catalonia: Why Spain needs a constitutional overhaul by Camino Mortera-Martinez 4 October 2017
Catalonia’s illegal referendum has resulted in a serious constitutional crisis in Spain. Madrid needs to urgently revise the country’s model of regional government. Television footage of Spain’s Guardia Civil officers in riot gear manhandling Catalonian citizens as they tried to vote in Sunday’s independence referendum have shocked Europe. The images have fuelled accusations of political repression and heavy-handedness by the national government. But what is happening in Catalonia is not a case of a state denying the democratic rights of its people. It is the product of increasingly radical separatism and a constitutional framework that is too rigid to accommodate those demands. To avoid further confrontation, Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, needs to urgently reform the country’s model of regional government. Spain needs to find ways to better satisfy the hunger for greater self-determination in parts of the country. The only way to do that is to change the Spanish constitution, and do so with the consensus of Spanish society. Catalans have long been proud of their individual identity, marked by their own language, renowned artists like Dali and Gaudi, a world-famous football team, and a degree of political and financial autonomy. Support for Catalonia’s independence has surged in recent times, as a response to Spain’s economic crisis and the central government’s many corruption scandals. For the past six years, the Catalan government has called on Madrid to allow the region to hold an independence referendum. Rajoy’s response was unequivocal: the Spanish constitution protects the country’s territorial integrity and forbids such referendums. For Spaniards the 1978 constitution represents the key to a political consensus which allowed the country to draw a line under decades of repression and dictatorship and to become a modern European democracy. Not all Catalans want independence. A survey carried out in July by the regional government’s Centre of Opinion Studies found 49.9 per cent of voters opposed independence, while while 41.1 per cent supported it. Nevertheless, when Carles Puigdemont – a life-long separatist – became leader of Catalonia’s regional administration in January 2016, with the backing of a handful of like-minded, radical CER INSIGHT: Crunch time in Catalonia: Why Spain needs a constitutional overhaul 4 OCTOBER 2017
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