The reelection of Jordi Cuixart as president of Òmnium Cultural is not a humanitarian gesture. It is above all a political response by this pro-independence Catalan cultural association to the repression and violence which the Spanish state has used to weaken the independence movement. Cuixart has now been locked up in Soto del Real prison for eight inexplicable months, a period in which the Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena has maintained the decision that he must remain in preventive custody, while also discarding each and every one of the legal petitions made for the release or transfer of the nine Catalan political prisoners.
Both the judicial and executive arms of the Spanish state have played their roles in this cause: the former, through the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, which used legal artifices to prevent the reelection of exiled Catalan president Carles Puigdemont as well as the presidential investitures of Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Turull; the latter, through the Spanish government's refusal to publish the names of Catalan president Quim Torra's first-choice cabinet in the official gazette because the list included ministers who were in prison. Yet neither arm of Spanish power has been able to do anything in the case of the reelection of Cuixart. They have certainly tried to pursue the cultural association as if it were a criminal organization, with police searches of its offices in January and March this year, hunting for documentation which Òmnium could easily have been made to deliver with a simple court order.
The response to each search was an avalanche of new membership subscriptions, bringing the total of the associations' membership to 120,000, double the number which Òmnium had just a few years ago. That a body like Òmnium, formed on 11th July 1961 in the middle of the Franco dictatorship, has never had a president put into prison for political reasons until last October gives an idea of the current state of fundamental freedoms in Spain. The fact that the political prisoners Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn, Raül Romeva, Carme Forcadell, Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Jordi Sànchez, are, in addition to the roles they have held in Catalonia's government, parliament and the ANC civil group, also members of Òmnium, is not a coincidence.
The new Spanish government led by Pedro Sánchez has a duty to respond to all of this injustice. Undoubtedly, the new government's comfortable position installed in the Moncloa palace does not encourage it to do so. Nor does the climate that the now-governing PSOE party — together with its allies in imposing Catalan repression, the PP and Cs - has created on the streets. The PSOE administration's first steps are disappointing, starting with the lies told by new interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who has absolved himself from any part of the responsibility for a possible transfer of prisoners to penitentiaries closer to home. Sánchez has a margin to act in this case and he knows that very well.
Dialogue and perseverance were what Jordi Cuixart asked for in the letter read to the Òmnium membership on Saturday. It seems easy, but it is not. It is many years since political paralysis came to dominate Madrid and left room only for threats and repression. Or empty words. President Torra has said that the independence movement is already seated at the table waiting to negotiate. And you, Sánchez?