Mark Nayler

Catalonia’s president refuses to back down after referendum violence

The violence which marred Catalonia’s independence referendum has dominated the coverage, but the region’s president is confident about what the result means: Catalonia has won the ‘right to an independent state in the form of a Republic,’ he said last night. The outcome of the vote certainly seems convincing at first glance: 90 per cent of Catalans voted to split from Spain on a 42 per cent turnout. But Puigdemont’s many opponents say that the chaotic nature of yesterday’s voting renders the overall result meaningless. According to Catalan authorities, 319 of around 2,300 polling stations across Catalonia were closed by police. In the run-up to the vote, Rajoy’s government seized some 10 million ballot papers, prompting Puigdemont to tell Catalans that they could print off their own ballots at home and vote wherever they liked. Unsurprisingly, this has led some groups – such as the anti-secession organisation Societat Civil – to claim that some voters cast multiple ballot papers.  It’s not only the statistics from the vote being called into question, however. The more decisive objection to yesterday’s vote remains that it possesses no binding or legal force whatsoever. Weeks before it happened, Spain’s highest court ruled that the proposed referendum violated the Spanish constitution and was therefore illegal – a decision that has since been the foundation of Rajoy’s opposition to the vote. In fact, so determined is the Spanish prime minister to undermine the referendum’s legitimacy that he hasn’t even denounced its result as meaningless. He simply stated yesterday evening that ‘there has not been a referendum on self-determination in Catalonia’. For many Spanish nationalists, yesterday’s vote was a chimera, an embarrassing piece of play-acting by deluded separatists.

Fully aware of the fact that he risks prison by pursuing secession, Puigdemont went ahead with yesterday’s referendum anyway – an act of defiance to which Rajoy responded by sending the troops in.

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