Even as Spain’s regional separatist political parties are the lever on which the country’s next government will likely be raised, Catalonia’s regional independence movement appears to be losing momentum on the street.
“The independence movement’s base appears to be divided, demobilized, but also radicalized,” the Spanish newspaper El Debate concluded in a recent article.
The evaluation was based on the low turnout for three marches in Barcelona promoting independence from Spain for the Catalonia region.
Two marches on Sunday, October 1st, to commemorate the 2017 illegal and unilaterally organized referendum on the region’s relation to the Spanish nation petered out quickly amid acts of low-level violence directed at institutions of the Spanish state.
The civic organization Asamblea Nacional Catalana organized a march in the morning that a mere thousand people attended. In the afternoon, another march, held by the radical left group Cómites de Defensa de la República, didn’t even bring a thousand people. In fact, the number of marchers was far fewer. According to El Debate, the march didn’t even reach its final destination, the government delegation in Barcelona, as barely fifty people remained in the demonstration.
As the CDR is classified as a terrorist group, the march was followed closely by the Catalan police, the Mossos of Esquadra. One of the destinations of the march was one of the local offices of the Guardia Civil, a national police force. The local police had placed a heavy presence there and, indeed, the marchers threw eggs and flour and overturned the police barricade. In the altercation with the authorities, the march broke up.
At the morning march, participants burned Spanish flags.
While Catalan nationalism is still a strong undercurrent of Catalan society, the small turnouts contrast strongly with the tens of thousands who have assembled recently in Spanish cities to protest the whitewashing of independence movements within the country by acting president Pedro Sánchez.
A multitudinous pro-Spain march is planned in Barcelona for October 8.
