Catalan independence supporters celebrate their national day divided and weakened

Madrid. Catalonia’s national day, the Diada, was celebrated by a divided pro-independence movement, which also experienced one of the days with the lowest social mobilisation in recent years, a further sign of its weakness after losing the regional government, which has been in the hands of the socialist Salvador Illa since last August. The popular demonstrations barely brought together 72,000 people in the main cities of the region, while just five years ago they brought together more than a million people in the streets.

According to local police figures, 60,000 people gathered in Barcelona; 6,800 in Girona; 3,000 in Lleida; 2,800 in Tarragona and 1,200 in Tortosa, according to local police figures.

The Catalan separatist parties’ bloc is broken, which is why they have decided to celebrate the Diada separately and in some cases even shouting at each other. As happened in Barcelona, ​​at an event of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) a group of CUP supporters interrupted the event with shouts of “traitors” and repudiated the agreement that ERC reached with the socialists to push forward the investiture of Illa in exchange for the supposed approval of a new financing model, which is still up in the air.

The president of one of the pro-independence civil society platforms rooted in the region, Òmnium Cultural, Xavier Antich, acknowledged at the end of the demonstration that “the permanent fight has brought us to where we are,” after admitting that only fewer people gathered in the year of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Constitutional Court agreed in a plenary session on Wednesday to unanimously admit the question of “unconstitutionality” presented by the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court, considering that the deletion of the crimes of the failed independence process of October 2017 in Catalonia “violates the right to equality before the law and to legal certainty.”

This issue will be the first matter related to the amnesty to be resolved by the Constitutional Court, which will also have to resolve more than a dozen appeals presented by various autonomous communities and defence arguments by the lawyers of some pro-independence leaders, including former president Carles Puigdemont.

Former Justice Minister Juan Carlos Campo will not be able to participate in the debates due to his direct links to the current government, of which he was a senior official, and because as minister he produced and published several reports in which he defended the pardons but described as “unconstitutional” a potential amnesty that was finally approved in the Spanish Congress.