It's just on a year since the failed attempt to invest Jordi Turull as president of Catalonia, since the return to prison of Turull along with Josep Rull, Raül Romeva, Dolors Bassa and Carme Forcadell, since the departure of Marta Rovira to exile in Switzerland. Three different events with a common thread: Spain's repression of the Catalan independence movement. As we see now in the Supreme Court trial - already in its sixth week - the accusation of rebellion, which is what justifies the pre-trial prison, is far from proven, no matter how many Civil Guard officers persist in their apocalyptic descriptions of the events outside the Catalan economy ministry on September 20th, 2017 and the referendum on October 1st. To see the definition of violence, you only have to look at what is happening on many weekends in Paris, instigated by the yellow vests. How long a prison sentence would the prosecutor want for them, if the Spanish Supreme Court criteria were to be applied?
It has taken a year to be able to open up freely about the enormous truths of those days and to pronounce some of the failings which the partisan and fratricidal struggle of the independence movement (and also the pro-sovereignty parties) didn't know how to, didn't want to or wasn't able to address. We have to thank Xavier Domènech, former coordinator of Catalunya en Comú (Commons) and leader of the pary's group in Parliament until September last year when he left all public office, who reflected on whether his group and others had really responded to the challenge in the failed investiture of Turull and the obvious threat that he would enter prison the following day.
It's obvious that they didn't, and that neither did the CUP, and that they didn't know how to read the significance of that vote that went beyond the investiture of a deputy as president, since it implied giving the state the dilemma of, were it to go through with its intentions, imprisoning a Catalan president immediately after he had been elected by Parliament. Obviously, regret will not transport Catalan politics back to that moment. But Domènech's attitude is honest. It should be understood that Domènech's thinking is shared by the then-spokesperson for the Commons in Parliament, Elisenda Alamany, who has just joined the ERC list for the Barcelona City Council. And by Josep Nuet, who has made the same move, to join the list for the Spanish Congress.
How important the votes of Domènech, Alamany and Nuet would have been a year ago! History, or at least this chapter of it, would perhaps have been written differently. It was not possible then and it all comes out a year later. The volcano that is Catalan politics sometimes hurls out irrefutable truths like this which should make us all think.