Read in Catalan

We make a note of it. This language, apparently not so diplomatic, is the one used by the director for Europe and the G-20 of the Presidency of the Spanish Government, Álvaro Renedo, in an email sent to the Belgian Ambassador to Madrid after the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel, expressed support to Catalonia. Renedo certainly didn’t lack words, and his boss, the Catalan Jorge Moragas, not physically far from his office in the Moncloa, must have been aware of the mail sent and all the details. The mail has other elements that demonstrate the increasing nervousness of the Spanish government, such as considering the bilateral relations severely compromised between Spain and Belgium. Outside of this note, there is also the leak from the Moncloa that Spain will not give its support to the Belgian candidature to Europol as a reprisal.

The Belgian case serves as an example of everything that is stirring within the community institutions, and that Spain is trying to keep silent through pressures and threats. What the ex-minister Margallo qualified a while back about certain purchases of support from other countries to avoid that they took a stand in favour of Catalan independence: "Nobody knows how many favours we owe to a number of people for having made the declarations they made," stated the former head of Spanish diplomacy last March. Michel does not play a central role in European politics, but he has two things that make his position particularly important. His country belongs to the group of the six founders of what became the EU, and in Belgium are situated the community’s institutions, as well as Le Soir, a historical newspaper with an important circulation in all official offices.

Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Slovenia head a group of countries advocating a solution to the conflict between Catalonia and Spain, far from the police repression of 1st October, and they are supporters of pushing the Spanish government to sit down and talk. It is within this framework that the aggressive response of Renedo and Moragas must be understood, as well as the more than cold reception between Rajoy and Michel on Thursday in Brussels. When Rajoy's cabinet tells its Belgian counterpart that "we have only seen attacks on the government of Spain", it is suggesting much more than a diplomatic protest. It is suggesting an open confrontation, since Madrid knows how much is at stake if it doesn’t manage to crush at any price whatever opposition, large or small, from other member states. That is also why it wants to apply a special 155 to Belgium: humiliate it, as if it had no right to express its opinion, threaten it with all evils if it confronts Spain and invents a story of citizens’ rights and freedoms that has little to do with reality. The so-called Spanish Netherlands of more than three centuries ago have ceased to be.