The holding on Saturday of more than 300 festive events throughout Catalonia coinciding with the day of reflection prior to the Spanish general election makes Democratic Tsunami into the catalyst for the civil disobedience and protests against the recent court decisions on pro-independence leaders. The group thus takes up the preeminent role that, at other times, the ANC and Òmnium have had, and leaves in the background, for the moment, any institutional response that may be given by the Catalan government and Parliament. Tsunami, which on Saturday reported more than 1,000 coordinated IT attacks on the part of the Spanish state to undermine its mobile app, has shown strength in the international support it has received and, far from being intimidated, proposed the day of election eve activities as a challenge to Spain's electoral commission and an aperitif for the days of protest it has announced from November 11th to 13th.
Obviously, right now, Tsunami, a movement without any known visible leaders which announces its actions through digital platforms, has turned into a real headache for the Spanish state, which first tried to criminalize it, and then announced, through Pedro Sánchez himself, that the intelligence services and police were investigating it; later, we heard that they had information and "would get to the bottom of it". The initial Spanish government idea was to be able to declare a great victory before election day but, far from this, there is the widespread impression that, up till now, if all their intelligence resembles anything, it probably looks quite like what they knew about the referendum ballot boxes before October 1st 2017. The announcement on Saturday of a meeting of the so-called committee to monitor the situation in Catalonia, coordinated by Sánchez himself, several ministers and senior departmental officials, had a strong whiff of electoral propaganda about it, which the electoral commission allowed the Spanish government to conduct on the pre-electoral day of reflection because the context was - and is - Catalonia.
Undoubtedly, this election night will have Catalonia at the centre of all the analyses made after 8pm, when the polling stations close. It will then be possible to see the extent to which the PSOE made an error by offering a discourse not differing at all from that of the Popular Party on Catalonia; also, the strength of the independence movement, which, with three parties taking part in the poll, will have the chance to achieve a majority of the 48 Catalan seats in the Congress of Deputies for the first time, after the figure of 22 which was obtained in April. If this is the case, the response to the Supreme Court verdicts at the polls would acquire an unknown and unexpected political dimension for Spain's 'deep state', which had seen in such a positive light the 100 years' jail sentence given to the Catalan political prisoners.