"Any settlement [between the Catalan and Spanish governments] must include the option of a referendum on independence". That's the verdict of an article published this Thursday in The Economist. The influential British weekly describes an incompetent and intolerant Rajoy, incapable of understanding the situation and managing it, alongside a Puigdemont leading the independence movement along the path of illegality and who would harm Catalonia if he achieved his goal in this way.
"Only a negotiation can restore calm and it should start immediately", says the paper, which predicts that "even now most Catalans can probably still be won over with the offer of greater autonomy, including the power to raise and keep more of their own taxes, more protection for the Catalan language and some kind of recognition of the Catalans as a 'nation'". They even suggest that Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy could "take up the opposition Socialists’ idea of turning Spain into a federal state".
Rajoy is marked out in harsh terms as bearing the main responsibility for the worsening of the conflict in Catalonia. "When a democracy sends riot police to beat old ladies over the head with batons and stop them voting, something has gone badly wrong," they write, in reference to the events of 1st October. "Whatever the provocation from Catalan leaders in staging an unconstitutional poll, the reaction of Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, has thrown Spain into its worst constitutional crisis since an attempted coup in 1981," they continue.
"If Mr Rajoy thought that cracking heads would put a stop to secessionism, he could not have been more wrong. He has only created a stand-off that has energised his enemies and shocked his friends. On October 3rd Catalonia, one of Spain’s richest regions, was paralysed by a protest strike. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have marched to express their outrage."