This Sunday marks six months since the 1st October referendum, a key date in the recent history of Catalonia and the state's greatest defeat in modern Spain. A failure which unsettled the state and its civil servants which, far from having tried to find a solution at a negotiating table, has returned us to the darkest Spain which we believe, sincerely, to have left behind with the transition to democracy. It wasn't true. The state's response has been the repression, exile or imprisonment of the Catalan leaders and the suppression of its people's fundamental rights. Always persecution or fear; never negotiation and agreement.
Six months since those images which startled the world and distanced us from Europe. Never before had a European police force been seen acting with such violence against citizens who wanted to put votes in ballot boxes. Just that. The state has been unrelenting with the Catalan people, but the problem hasn't shrunk. On the contrary, in many aspects it's greater today than six months ago. Its internationalisation is a clear example. The work by minister Margallo through the chanceries giving out perks and buying support, as he himself has recognised, hasn't been enough to conceal the absurdity meant by the repression and judicialisation.
The great paradox is that such efforts for the conflict to not go beyond Spain's borders have done little good and the Catalan conflict has climbed up with European political and media agenda. Brussels and Berlin have to speak about it daily and public opinion there is moving ever further away from Spanish repression, whether through the police or legal dictates.
Whilst the conflict's profile is quite clear when we're talking about international repercussion, it's not so much when the harm caused in Catalonia is analysed. Suppression of autonomy, dismissal of the government, application of article 155, as well as prison, exile and reduction of fundamental rights. But that's not all. The debate within the independence movement remains over how to confront the state's challenges, the role of the legitimate president of Catalonia and whether the creation of a government necessarily within the autonomous community model is progress or not at the current crossroads.
Although the final result is still a long way from being written, persistence and non-violence, identifying values of the independence movement over all these years, have to always accompany all the steps taken. Only in that way will Catalonia continue having options of winning in a Europe which has shown too often that first comes the states, and last the citizens.