Some 150,000 Catalan separatists rallied in Barcelona on Sunday, attempting to reignite an independence motion that’s fraying because it nears the five-year anniversary of its failed breakaway bid from Spain.
For the previous 10 years, the September 11 rally held on Catalonia’s essential vacation has been the point of interest of the rich northeastern area’s separatist motion.
It has drawn in a number of lots of of hundreds of people that need to create a brand new nation within the western Mediterraneanculiminating in an October 2017 independence push, which obtained no worldwide help and was shortly quashed.
However the unity between pro-independence political events and the civil society teams that led in October 2017 is in peril of falling aside resulting from conflicting views on the best way to go ahead.
The Catalan Nationwide Meeting (ANC), a civil group that organised Sunday’s march, is strongly against the talks that the Catalan authorities is holding with Spain’s central authorities in Madrid.
The influential organisation says it has misplaced religion in political events and is able to transfer on alone in the direction of a brand new try at breaking with Spain. That led to Catalonia’s regional president, Pere Aragonès, turning into the primary Catalan president to not attend the annual march.
Dolors Feliu, ANC president, advised the AP information company that she hoped Sunday’s rally could be a wake-up name for Aragonès to cease negotiations with the central authorities.
Barcelona’s police estimated that about 150,000 individuals attended the rally. Organisers claimed a number of hundred thousand extra.
Amid a sea of pro-independence flags, some marchers carried indicators demanding Catalan authorities both make a “Declaration of Independence or resign”.
Aragonès has defended the talks with the federal government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as important.
He insists that he won’t surrender his pledge to carry one other referendum on independence however that the talks are essential to discovering options for the handfuls of Catalans in authorized bother for his or her function within the 2017 breakaway bid that was dominated unlawful by Spanish courts.
Coinciding with the talks, Spain’s authorities issued pardons final yr for 9 Catalan separatist leaders who had been sentenced to lengthy jail phrases for main the 2017 bid.
Catalan separatist events gained 52 p.c of the vote final yr and maintained their maintain on the regional parliament.
However after years of maximum tensions and protests that turned violent in 2019, many individuals, particularly the roughly half of Catalans who need to stay part of Spain, are relieved there’s a dialogue with central authorities.
The infighting threatening Catalonia’s separatist trigger comes whereas Scotland is searching for to carry a second referendum on independence from the UK after the “No” vote gained in 2014.