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.
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