Mark Nayler

Spain’s hunger for political change may be just what Catalonia needs

Some unjustified assumptions inform the Spanish government’s anti-Catalonian rhetoric: that it will be in power long enough to prevent Catalonia leaving Spain; that it can disallow the region’s continued or renewed membership of the EU as an independent state; or, at the very least, that it can ban a referendum on the matter.

On 20 December, Spaniards head to the polls in a general election that will see the country’s two main parties – the governing, conservative Popular Party and the socialist PSOE – challenged, for the first time in the country’s democratic history, by newcomers such as leftist Podemos (‘We Can’) and centre-right Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’). The makeup of the next Spanish government is at present an unknown quantity, meaning there is a chance of improved communication and negotiation between Barcelona and Madrid. The Catalan president Artur Mas can perhaps be a little more optimistic about the fraught project of keeping an independent Catalonia in the EU.

Mas wrote to Alex Salmond recently to thank him for his recent show of support for Catalonian secessionists. Salmond, Mas enthused, can take the credit for ‘driving an exemplary process between Scotland and the rest of the UK’ (omitting to mention that said process culminated with Scotland voting to remain in the UK and Salmond’s subsequent resignation).

It is natural that Mas, whose pro-independence coalition gained 62 seats in the region’s 135-seat parliament last month, has turned to the Scottish independence movement as an example for Catalonia. He wants, as his role-model Salmond did, the best of both worlds: the security of remaining in the EU – and in Catalonia’s case the single currency – as well as the ability to reject centralised rule from Spain. Mas can look to Scotland for guidance on how to navigate the intricate legalities of such a manoeuvre.

For an independent Catalonia seeking continued membership of the EU, there would be two options, as there would have been if Scotland had split from the UK.

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