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When a reflection is made, without the pressure of day-to-day news deadlines, on the capability of the Catalan independence movement to mobilize support during these last few years, it will be difficult not to emphasize three of its most outstanding characteristics: perseverance, ambition and discipline. And its civic-mindedness, of course. The attitude that allows a clearly-peaceful civic movement to mobilize huge crowds without even the smallest incident.

If between 2012 and 2017, the movement has been capable of organising rallies of a size unparalleled in Europe, the achievement of drawing about 45,000 people, according to the Belgian police, to travel from Catalonia to Brussels on a frozen December day is a milestone without precedents and makes it clear that the Catalan issue will end up being a European problem, whether or not the EU authorities want it to be so. The Catalan convoy moves with a firmness that comes from its base in solid values, at present far from a position of equidistance, knowing that the struggle it has on the horizon will be longer than thought.

The process is not kaput, as Spanish deputy PM Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría told the Congress on Wednesday. The application of article 155 has wrested from independence the control of the institutions that it had won at the ballot boxes and the Spanish state has now called elections that some of the combatants approach at a disadvantage. One candidate is in exile (Puigdemont) and another in prison (Junqueras). And the independence movement is pursued on all fronts. But it is not kaput as is spuriously announced from official sources.

This Thursday's mobilization in Brussels, where people of all ages and from all parts traveled all the way to Belgium, demonstrates that. It was not a demonstration by the rich, as was pejoratively repeated on a Spanish television channel. It was simply a demonstration by the Catalonia which does not want its dignity to be run over and is not prepared to resign itself to the seizure of its institutions. Which is prepared to rise up very patiently, perhaps. Without losing the final objective from view.