Loaded Dice

How Catalan nationalists are able to spread dodgy narratives with impunity

"Dice" by Michelle Haddock is licensed under CC0 1.0

This week’s entry is a little longer than usual, so please make yourself comfortable first!

In May 2021, La Vanguardia - the main newspaper in Barcelona - ran a front-page news story saying that Pere Aragonès had become the 132nd president of Catalonia. You might be forgiven for thinking that 132 is a very large number. The US has only had 46 presidents, while Britain has only had 55 prime ministers. Strangely enough, when Josep Tarradellas - president of the Catalan government in exile - returned to the territory in 1977 to become its official president, La Vanguardia didn’t mention that he was supposedly the 125th man to hold the post. What happened between 1977 and 2021? And how did the number of former presidents get so high?

The short answer is that a Catalan historian called Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté published a study in 2003, which conflated the history of a medieval Catalan institution called the Generalitat (dissolved in 1716) with the modern government with the same name (founded in 1931, exiled in 1939 and re-established in 1977). He claimed that the most senior clergyman on the medieval council was roughly equivalent to a modern chairman or president. This meant that Berenguer de Cruïlles, a bishop of Girona in the 14th century, allegedly became the first Catalan president in 1359 - a full 363 years before Robert Walpole became the first prime minister of Great Britain or 430 years before George Washington became the first US president.

It is difficult to imagine a 14th century bishop in a medieval monarchy having quite the same role as a modern politician in a liberal democracy. Normally, such an ostentatious claim would be ridiculed or ignored. Not in Catalonia, though, where questionable claims about Catalonia being the true home of democracy have excited nationalists since at least the 1970s. Nationalist politician Artur Mas became regional president in 2010. By 2015, he had discovered Solé i Sabaté’s work and was claiming to be the 129th man to hold his position.

Such inflated claims are perfectly normal for nationalists. In 1948, George Orwell wrote: “Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should […] and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.”

One of the key founders of Catalan nationalism, Enric Prat de la Riba, was once surprisingly honest about doing just this. In a famous essay published in 1906, he wrote that the early nationalists were using “calculated opportunism” to insinuate modern concepts like national identity into medieval material.

Prat de la Riba’s opportunism fell on fertile ground in the early years of the 20th century. Spain had struggled to establish a federal state during the 19th century. The loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898 was experienced as a disaster by Catalan businessmen. At the same time, racial theorists were speculating on allegedly innate ethnic differences between Spaniards from the Pyrenees and those further south.

Tourists to Barcelona can spot remnants of this “fantasy world in which things happen as they should” by wandering through the city’s wildly inauthentic Gothic Quarter. It was beautified by early nationalists between 1882 and 1929, with neo-gothic improvements continuing right up to 1970. More recently, the New History Institute, which spreads conspiracy theories about famous people from William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes allegedly being Catalans, has received large amounts of money from the regional government.

To return to the number of presidents, why didn’t La Vanguardia fact-check Mas when he started making questionable historical claims around the same time he was laying the seeds for the contemporary independence movement? We might never know the real answer, but I suspect it will encompass greed and fear. The newspaper launched a Catalan-language edition in 2011, just after Mas gained power. In return, he offered it large subsidies from the regional government, creating an incentive for it not to rock the boat.

Around the same time that Mas was mainstreaming Solé i Sabaté’s speculative count, his side was setting up a Russian-funded army of bots to swamp the social media accounts of anyone who questioned nationalists narratives, as I found out to my cost. Standing up and being critical of the movement before Twitter cracked down on bots was scary. La Vanguardia’s editors took the cowardly route and echoed the narrative instead of fact-checking it. They continued to do so even after the bot army was dismantled.

A free press has a clear and important role in society. It is meant to be a bullwark of independence and critical thought. If it works well, it should make politicians think twice before spreading untrue narratives. La Vanguardia failed in this role in Catalonia, but it wasn’t alone.

Both formerly Catalan banks, CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell, moved their headquarters outside the region in 2017 in the midst of the a self-coup led by Mas’ hand-picked successor Carles Puigdemont. Executives at both banks declined to publicly discuss the risks of the nationalist push to break the Spanish Constitution as it picked up a head of steam from 2014. Many other institutions failed to sound the alarm too, particularly Catalonia’s universities.

Sadly, the cowardice of Catalan institutions has let the nationalist side get away with spreading some very questionable narratives. One of the most serious mis-representations is the idea that a majority of residents support independence. This led to sloppy articles in the international press about “the Catalans” as if the whole population speaks with one voice.

The nationalist side has always known that its numbers are weak, so it tries to load the dice. For example, in 1979, the nationalists and the Socialists agreed a provisional electoral law that restricted Barcelona to 85 deputies out of 135 in the Catalan parliament. This meant that residents of the Catalan capital get one deputy for every 50,000 votes, compared to one in 40,000 for the other provinces. More than 40 years later and there is no sign of the “temporary” law being renegotiated.

The nationalist side was able to reap the rewards of the unfair electoral law almost immediately. Jordi Pujol’s nationalist alliance Convergence & Union (CiU) won 37% of the vote in Girona province in 1980, but only 28% across the region. The bump from the electoral law helped him get a dominant position in the regional parliament. He cut deals with other parties to form a government. He was president for 23 years and picked Mas as his successor as party leader. If we fast-forward to the present day, Together for Catalonia (Junts per Catalunya) - CiU’s successor party - got nearly 13 more points in Girona than it did in the rest of the region in 2021, helping it become a kingmaker.

The roots of Pujol’s political career can be found in the early 1960s, when he was found guilty of writing leaflets against Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. He served two and a half years of a long prison sentence. This cemented his street credibility after Spain returned to democracy; and formed the cornerstone of the mythology about Franco’s regime being particularly hard on Catalonia. Pujol formed CiU in 1978 as a joint venture between two small nationalist parties. Many Francoist mayors in Catalonia joined the party, which also gained the support of many families that had done well during the dictatorship despite lingering concerns about monolingual schooling in Spanish. Pujol’s time in prison provided useful cover.

During his long time in power, Pujol acted as a power-broker whenever there was a hung parliament in Madrid in return for investment in Catalonia. He is currently under investigation for corruption on a staggering scale during these years. Some reports suggest he stashed as much 100m euros in various tax havens.

The highlight of Pujol’s time in power was probably the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. The city was able to present an image as a modern, cosmopolitan and open place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pujol wasn’t enthusiastic about the games, which were promoted by the Socialist mayor of Barcelona. Of course, modernity, cosmopolitanism and openness tend to trouble nationalists, who prefer a more provincial vision of society.

One of Pujol’s greatest successes came in 1990, when he proposed a Plan 2000 to infiltrate all levels of society with nationalist sentiment. It particularly focused on the media, finance and education - three institutions that are meant to defend pluralism but failed badly in the run-up to 2017. Education in particular was the centrepiece of the plan, with monolingual schooling in Catalan being particularly important for his nation-building plans. As we saw last week, a small percentage of the population who grew up speaking Spanish have switched to Catalan as their main language as adults.

Although Pujol’s successor Mas won the regional elections in 2003 and 2006, CiU failed to get a majority in either election. The Socialist Party (which is often led by Catalan-speaking moderate nationalists) formed a three-way alliance to govern. Crucially, one of the members of the alliance was Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), which made sure that nationalist infiltration of Catalan institutions was left in peace. ERC was particularly protective of nationalist narratives on TV3, the region’s public TV channel.

In 2008, Pujol’s wife, Marta Ferrusola, channelled the id of many ethno-nationalists on the right when she said that it was “very annoying” that Socialist José Montilla, who was regional president between 2006 and 2010, had been born in Andalucia and hadn’t changed his name to Josep. Her husband had already apologized for a xenophobic article he had written in the 1950s about people from Andalucia allegedly having a poor character and being a risk for Catalan nationalist identity. The shockingly snobbish article was written shortly before a huge wave of migration from Andalucia in the 1960s and 1970s. Montilla moved to the outskirts of Barcelona at the age of 16 during these years.

Mas finally came close to a majority on his third attempt in 2010 by beating Montilla’s Socialists, but it was a poisoned chalice. The whole of Spain, including Catalonia, was struggling with an awful recession; the Socialists had publicly accused CiU of taking a 3% commission on public works in 2009; and rising anger about CiU’s cuts peaked in 2011 when a group of protesters surrounded the regional parliament.

Imagine yourself in Mas’s shoes. You are governing in a recession. You want to change the subject away from your party’s corruption and budget cuts on basic services. You can see the sparks of populist anger. Why not fan the flames of populism but try to turn the fire towards nationalism? He decided to move CiU away from its pragmatic nation-building within a constitutionalist framework (while skimming money off the top) and towards populist nationalism.

The nationalist mythology suggests that the independence movement was fired up by a Spanish court cutting a handful of unconstitutional clauses from the regional statute in June 2010. However, a statistical analysis published in Nature in 2019 debunked this claim. It said that support for independence did indeed soar from 2010, particularly among native speakers of Catalan who consumed Catalan-language news from media controlled or subsidized by the regional government. However, the shift actually began before the court sentence.

The propaganda in the media controlled by the regional government reached awe-inspiring levels after Mas gained power. Journalist David Román (Spanish speakers should check out his Substack here) published an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2014, which pointed out that if you watched TV3, you might see “a thug, a prostitute or a lowlife” speaking Spanish, but nobody else. One former executive quoted in the article said that the propaganda on the channel was sometimes worse than Soviet TV and roughly equivalent to Cuban state TV.

The central idea of the populist nationalism encouraged by Mas and public media in the region is that Catalan-speaking supporters of independence are the true voice of the Catalan nation, while Spanish-speaking opponents are at best invisible and at worst illegitimate. Mas decided to take this theme to its logical conclusion by seeing if the media would buy narratives about huge numbers of Catalan speakers voting for independence without ever mentioning turnout rates.

Mas’s first experiment with this technique came in 2014. He ran an unofficial and illegal referendum and just invited the separatist side to vote. Around 2.3m votes were cast, with close to 81% supporting independence. Foreign residents were invited to vote and the regional government didn’t provide a turnout figure, but the media estimated it was around 37%. Some gullible commentators talked about 80% of “the Catalans” supporting independence; and Mas decided it was worth testing the limits of this approach.

In 2015, Mas called a regional election. He described it as a de-facto referendum, but - crucially - never defined what would be a win and what would be a loss. CiU and ERC joined forces in a new pro-independence platform called Together for Yes (Junts pel Sí) and filled it with people with Catalan names and surnames. The new party failed to break 40% - a drop of more than four points from 2012, when CiU and ERC ran separately.

However, a strange populist party called Popular Unity Candidacy (la CUP), which combines seemingly contradictory ideologies like nationalism and anarchism, also won just over 8% with a pro-independence platform. Of course, support for independence was stronger in the countryside, so Junts and la CUP gained a majority of seats due to the unfair electoral law mentioned earlier. Mas declared the result as a victory and tried to do a deal with la CUP.

The junior partner in the new coalition insisted that Mas had to stand down, so he chose Puigdemont, a fanatical supporter of independence, to be Catalan president instead. La CUP - to its credit - also insisted that 48% wasn’t a majority. It asked the coalition to start an independence process to culminate in an illegal referendum. This was slated for 2017. It was to be the centrepiece of a self-coup attempt, with the parliament voting for a new constitution without having a super-majority of two thirds, as called for in Articles 222 and 223 of Catalonia’s regional statutes.

Intimidation of the Spanish-speaking majority was a big part of the independence process. The Nature article mentioned above discussed “overwhelming social pressure by a continuous presence of secessionist symbols everywhere” and “successful silencing of the majoritarian non-secessionist citizenry throughout most of the upsurge.” One of the key events came just after the referendum, when hundreds of thousands of constitutionalists took to the streets of Barcelona in a massive demonstration. Many of them chanted that they were sick of being smeared as fascists.

Amazingly, the nationalist side had been bluffing throughout the separation process. Puigdemont declared independence, but suspended it; the central government suspended Catalonia’s autonomous status and called a snap election; a constitutionalist party won without a majority; and Puigdemont’s side was able to form an ineffective coalition government again.

Sadly, since then, the nationalist side has continued to have fun and games with turnout rates. When Puigdemont’s far-right successor Quim Torra was removed from office by the courts for leaving partisan messages on public meetings, it triggered a snap election in February 2021. The turnout rate was just 51% as many voters understandably stayed at home because of the pandemic. Nationalists were more likely to vote than constitutionalists, which led to some propagandists claiming that independence was now supported by a majority. Sadly, those of us who believe in maths know that getting half of half the vote is really a quarter.

As usual when dealing with Catalan nationalists, I will turn off the comments for today’s post. Many of them seem to find it hard to understand that journalists are meant to question nationalist narratives rather than just reprinting the mythology. Also, many nationalists on Twitter feel that any criticism of the movement is really an invitation to a week-long debate. Life is too short!

Orwell, of course, would be unsurprised. “As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort.” See you next week!

Further reading

Populist party la CUP brought together various smaller organizations in 2008. It ran in municipal elections in its early days. In 2012, it ran for the first time in the Catalan elections. When it was negotiating with Mas in 2015, he publicly threatened to reveal who had funded the party unless it threw in its lot with mainstream nationalists.

Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan nationalist organization that was decriminalized by Franco’s regime in 1967, spearheaded the push to independence from 2012, alongside the Catalan National Assembly (ANC). Mas’s government gave Òmnium 2.9m euros in 2011, 3.2m euros in 2012, 4.5m euros in 2013, 6.6m euros in 2014, 5.6m euros in 2015 and 4.4m euros in 2016. The ANC claims not to have received public funds, but doesn’t publish its accounts.

Someone has to pay for all the nation-building, not to mention illegal commissions. Guess who? Catalonia has the worst tax burden of all Spain’s regions.

Nationalist mismanagement of a divided society means that Barcelona lost out on the chance to consolidate itself as Spain’s economic hub. It has been overtaken by Madrid, where there is no glass ceiling for talented outsiders who lack the “right” surnames.

Political scientists use the principal-agent problem to analyse situations where elected officials hurt society by acting in their own narrow self-interest.

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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.