It should surprise no one that the Catalan pro-independence movement holds a new mass event in which it shows its resilience, like the one that took place this Saturday in Perpinyà. Pro-independence supporters have been overflowing the streets since 2012, demonstration after demonstration, challenging the interpretation of all those who analyse the movement as a temporary phenomenon and as the result of a situation that is more emotional than political. They could not be more wrong. Invariably Catalan independence supporters have enough arguments to defend their positions both in the streets and at the polls because, in the end, the two go hand in hand, and all polls forecast absolute majority for this political space in the forthcoming Catalan election.
It is difficult to know if there were 110,000 people, as the local police said, or more than 200,000, as the organisers stated, at Puigdemont’s return to Northern Catalonia. This is anecdotal, eventually. It is sufficient to say that there are very few political events attracting so many attendees either in France or in Spain. This figure had not been reached at Perpinyà’s Parc de les Exposicions since 1907, according to France 3 television. The Council for the Catalan Republic has had the ability to organise an event that, while maintaining exile and the Republic as the core, has been plural in its messages, inclusive in the role of the different political actors, and decisive in outlining something that may seem obvious but is not, as it can expand supports and raise the level of demand preventing the action of the Spanish repression.
Spanish minister of interior Marlaska's police could only interfere by obstructing access to the border for thousands of Catalans and by preventing Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí from entering the Girona region under threat of arrest. A curious democracy, the Spanish one, which can only witness, irritated and infuriated, a whole host of tributes by French authorities to Catalan exiles just thirty kilometres from the border. The only explanation for the receptions of all the political groups represented in the Perpinyà city council or the plenary of the regional Council of Pirineus Orientals (Eastern Pyrenees) to the exiled president is the different conception of democracy, freedom and justice. And this will be hidden or considered unremarkable by the Spanish media and part of the Catalan media.
The Spanish state’s deafness to any kind of Catalan claim has a long history and is the reason for the high level of scepticism toward the dialogue table. Jacobin France overtaking Spanish neocentralism that shouts and screams while it is humiliated by European justice time after time. And it was thanks to European justice that Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí were in Perpinyà and it will be thanks to European justice that one day the Catalan political prisoners will be released and obtain the justice that the Spanish courts have denied them.