Not with a Bang but a Whimper
Catalonia's populist independence movement has lost; largely due to a long-standing flaw of hyping up the minority of the region as the true voice of the people
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Tarradellas in 1979 - De Ministerio de la Presidencia. Gobierno de España, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65705778
Salvador Illa, a Socialist, became Catalan First Minister in early August. Although his investiture was somewhat over-shadowed by a disappearing act by fugitive Catalan nationalist leader Carles Puigdemont (who made a speech in Barcelona and then gave the police the slip), Illa’s victory was very significant. It marks the end of a decades-long cycle; and (probably) the beginning of a new one.
In short, the region’s push for independence, which was spearheaded for a time by Puigdemont, has failed miserably after slowly building a head of steam since 1980. The demographics look bad for the Catalan-nationalist side, due to widespread immigration from Latin America, Morocco, Pakistan and elsewhere. We appear to be entering a new chapter of Socialist domination of an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-lingual region.
It is interesting to note that the failure of the independence movement was foreshadowed by comments from one of Illa’s predecessors as First Minister, Josep Tarradellas, as far back as 1980. Before we tell the story, though, let’s introduce two of the main characters. Tarradellas was born in 1899 in the outskirts of Barcelona. He was involved in Catalan-nationalist politics in his youth and was one of the founders of Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), an allegedly left-wing Catalan separatist party that still exists. ERC gave its vote to Illa in August without entering a coalition with the Socialists.
In the runup to the Spanish Civil War, Tarradellas criticised hardline Catalan nationalists, who wanted to rush through the region’s independence. He was expelled from the party he co-founded as a result in 1933. Although he wasn’t involved in the 1934 revolution, which undermined the Spanish Republic, he was imprisoned anyway. He rejoined ERC in 1936 and formed part of the Catalan government as the Spanish Civil War began. He became ERC’s leader in 1938 and fled to France in 1939 when it became clear that the Republican side had lost.
In 1954, Tarradellas became First Minister of the Catalan government in exile. In the same year, he stepped down from the leadership of ERC. Spanish-nationalist dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975 at 82; and Tarradellas was confirmed as First Minister of the Catalan government in 1977. On his return, he famously declared: “Citizens of Catalonia, I am here now.”
Tarradellas chose his words very carefully. Catalonia was in the middle of a massive population movement, which began in the 1950s during Spain’s post-war boom and ended in the 1980s, when Spain was consolidating its position as a liberal democracy with devolved powers for regions like Catalonia. Many Spanish-speaking people from poor rural areas in the south of Spain moved to industrial cities further north in these years, including to Catalan capital Barcelona. Spanish replaced Catalan as the city’s majority language at some point during the 1960s and 1970s.
By referring to “citizens of Catalonia” instead of “Catalans,” Tarradellas wanted to include the newcomers in the plans to nurture liberal democratic institutions in the region. The numbers were enormous. Without immigration, it is estimated that Catalonia would have had 2.4m citizens around 2001, compared to 6.1m in reality. This later grew nearly 25% to 7.6m in 2019 thanks to another wave of immigration from places like Latin America, Morocco and Pakistan. It included the author of this column (I was born in the UK and moved here in 2005).
The politician announced his retirement after Catalonia’s regional statutes of 1979 crossed the line, almost a year after the Spanish Constitution of 1978 was approved by a massive majority throughout Spain with high turnout. A regional election to decide a new Catalan First Minister was held in March 1980. The vote was fairly evenly split. A right-wing Catalan nationalist / Christian democrat alliance called Convergence and Union (CiU) won a plurality (27.8%), followed by the Socialists (22.4%) and the local communist party (18.8%). A centrist party won 10.6% while ERC harvested 8.9%.
Before we turn to Tarradellas’ warning, we need to introduce one more character. CiU was led by Jordi Pujol, a doctor who had invented an antibiotic ointment. A Catalan nationalist, he had gained enormous street cred by being arrested for protesting against Franco as far back as 1960 just before he turned 30. His party was legalised in 1977; and Tarradellas had given him a role in his provisional government.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, CiU was finding a huge amount of support among middle-class native speakers of Catalan. Many of its supporters came from families that had supported Franco’s coup during the Civil War or that had got rich in its aftermath. Much of his audience had grown increasingly irritated as it had become clear that working-class newcomers to the region were reluctant to learn Catalan to a decent level. It is noteworthy that many of Franco’s Catalan mayors ended up joining the new party, while the migrants were often deeply committed Republicans. Many years later, a surprising number of the leaders of the independence movement were grandchildren of Franco’s Catalan mayors.
During his long time building a clandestine but middle-class ethno-nationalist movement, Pujol had made a number of xenophobic and nativist comments about the working-class newcomers to the region, which he disavowed many years later. In 1980, though, he clearly set himself out to represent the wealthy Catalan-speaking sections of the region rather than the whole of society.
In May 1980, Pujol was able to form a minority government with outside support. He laid out his aspirations in a speech to the Catalan parliament:
Our programme will have another characteristic: it will be a nationalist programme. If you vote for us, you will vote for a nationalist programme, a nationalist government and a nationalist president. You will vote for the determination to build a country, our country. You will vote for the will to defend a country, our country, which is a country whose identity is under attack.
Tarradellas was horrified. He wrote a long private letter to the editor of a Barcelona newspaper. Its contents were later leaked, leading to the letter being published in full. The outgoing First Minister said that the unity he had sought to nurture since the late 1970s had been broken. He was particularly shocked that Pujol’s team had urged him not to say “long live Catalonia and long live Spain” in a handover speech.
When it comes to Catalonia, I think it is urgent to recuperate the unity that was broken in May 1980 and that all that divides us is forgotten; because our country is too small to look down on any of its children and big enough that there is a space for all of us.
Although he doesn’t use the words “populism” (anti-pluralism) or “ethno-nationalism, (defining a political project in terms of shared heritage), the thrust of Tarradellas’ criticism is that Pujol was planning to govern as a populist ethno-nationalist. He wanted to divide Catalonia in two unequal halves; and declare the Catalan-speaking minority as the true people, who he would represent, while marginalising the Spanish-speaking majority.
Pujol’s late wife, Marta Ferrusola, who died earlier this year at the age of 89, acted as the id to the growing populist tendencies of the Catalan nationalist movement. In 2001, for example, she famously said that her seven kids (she was a strict Catholic), who were born between 1958 and 1972, would cry in the playground that they couldn’t play with the other children because “they are all Castilians” (ie, native Spanish speakers). The anecdote perfectly sums up the small-minded snobbery and xenophobia that lies at the heart of the Catalan-nationalist movement, which Tarradellas had noticed as far back in 1980.
In further comments during Pujol’s early stint in power, Tarradellas was even more biting. He privately described Pujol, who saw his job as preparing the region for its eventual independence, as “disruptive, sectarian and adept at playing the victim.” He also hinted at the dictatorial tendencies of his nemesis. He also described the new First Minister as corrupt, while also casting aspersions on his short height.
The corruption allegations would prove to be foresighted. Tarradellas based them on a series of scandals at Banca Catalana, a bank that had been founded by Pujol and his father in 1959. Although he was a Republican, Pujol’s father had educated his son at a German school because he thought the Nazis were going to win the Second World War. The elder Pujol made a fortune during the dictatorship. His bank had paid huge dividends to the family and other shareholders between 1974 and 1976, despite having a deficit. It was later rescued by another bank in 1984. First Minister Pujol was cleared of any criminal actions relating to the bank in 1986. The financial institution ceased to exist in 1988.
There would be many more corruption allegations in the years ahead. We will come to them soon. After finding a way to become First Minister in 1980, Pujol had plenty of time to implement his “nationalist programme.” One of the main achievements of his first term was a “linguistic normalisation” law in 1983, which gathered a broad consensus in the Catalan parliament. It promoted the use of the Catalan language as a default in official settings.
Despite beginning his time in power with a minority government, Pujol was able to govern for 23 years, all the way through to 2003. CiU won the next five regional elections in a row, with a high watermark of 46.2% in 1992 and a low watermark of 37.7% in 1999. He also supported minority governments from both the Socialists and the Popular Party (PP) in Madrid in return for infrastructure spending and more devolved powers in Catalonia.
The most noteworthy story during these years, other than corruption on a staggering scale, was “Programa 2000”- a plan from 1990 to infiltrate all of Catalonia’s institutions with nationalists. Pujol’s infiltration plan came two years after the death of his old sparring partner Tarradellas in 1988. The late institutionalist politician probably would have been shocked, but not necessarily surprised, to see such blatant partisanship corrupting institutions that were meant to serve the whole population and not just the Catalan-speaking minority.
Pujol decided not to run in the 2003 election. His hand-picked successor, Artur Mas (born in 1956), came first in terms of seats with 30.9% - a big drop-off from Pujol’s worst result since 1980. This created an opportunity for Catalan Socialist leader Pasqual Maragall (31.2% but fewer seats than CiU) - a former Mayor of Barcelona with nationalist tendencies, who had been born in 1941 to a Catalan-speaking family - to create a controversial coalition government. One of his partners was ERC, which was by now solidly separatist. Mas positively seethed at being leader of the opposition for the next seven years - he clearly felt being First Minister was his birthright.
In order to stay in power in Catalonia, Maragall and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister (PM) at the time (born in 1960), wrote ERC a blank cheque. They negotiated a new regional statute of autonomy for Catalonia in 2006, which was approved by a referendum marked by high abstention rates in June of that year. Unfortunately, the law was sloppily drafted and didn’t respect Spain’s hierarchy of laws. In 2010, Spain’s Constitutional Court rewrote 14 articles and dictated the interpretation of 27 more. Catalan nationalists exploded in anger, as we shall see later.
The Socialists called a snap regional election in November 2006 after the statutes of autonomy were approved but before the courts pushed back on the proposal. José Montilla - one of the many Catalan residents who had been born in Andalucía (in 1955 in his case) - had replaced Maragall as Socialist leader. He also came second to Mas with 26.8% to 31.5%, but was once again able to form a three-way coalition including ERC as one of his partners. Many Catalan nationalists were horrified that someone they saw as an outsider could govern the region. Predictably, Pujol’s wife publicly expressed her outrage that he hadn’t changed his name to Josep.
Catalonia was hit hard by the credit crunch of 2006-7. as was the rest of Spain, and the region struggled to shake off a deep depression afterwards. Mas finally got his chance to claim his inheritance in 2010, when CiU stomped the Socialists with 38.4% against a shockingly poor 18.4%. The Catalan-nationalist party came close to a full majority. Mas became First Minister thanks to a Socialist abstention.
Unfortunately for an establishment politician, Mas’ timing was terrible. The economy was still weak; and people were angry. There was a massive nationalist demonstration against Spain’s Constitutional Court in June 2010. A year later, Mas was shaken when he had to use a helicopter to attend the regional parliament due to a fierce demonstration by “the indignant ones” - unemployed and angry youths. They were furious at corruption and susceptible to populist narratives.
There had been widespread corruption under Pujol’s watch. In 2005, Socialist First Minister Maragall made an infamous speech in the Catalan parliament accusing CiU of systematically skimming 3% off the top of all public contracts for decades. Mas looked positively shocked to see his party’s dirty laundry washed in public. Even if you don’t speak Catalan, a one-minute video of the exchange is worth watching. Mas speaks first, followed by Maragall, and then Mas again.
As the ultimate insider, Mas must have had a good idea of what was coming next. In 2014, Pujol admitted to having offshore bank accounts. Several of his sons faced charges of tax evasion and corruption around the same time; and one of them ended up in prison. Pujol would eventually renounce his salary as ex-First Minister and forfeit all public honours.
Although he has never been formally charged, prosecutors suspect Pujol’s clan robbed hundreds of millions of euros. Some even put the total in billions. We will probably never know the full amount. It is worth flagging research that shows that although populist leaders often rail against corrupt elites, they are usually extremely corrupt themselves when they become elected officials.
All of this lay ahead of Mas in 2010. He had a serious problem at the time. How could the party founded by Pujol survive the coming corruption scandals when there was a populist mood in Catalonia? Mas, who has a cynical streak, decided to take the populist element from CiU’s “nationalist programme” and put it at the heart of his new agenda. He pivoted hard to populist ethno-nationalism; and began to flirt with full-blown separatism, particularly after the helicopter incident in 2011.
Between 2011 and 2013, Mas’ new regional government gave large sums of money to Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan-nationalist organisation founded and legalised during the dictatorship in the 1960s, which had also received funds from the Socialist-led coalition. It would play a key role in organising pro-independence demonstrations in Barcelona, along with the Catalan National Assembly (ANC). The ANC was founded in 2011/12 by long-standing separatists, many with links to the radical wing of ERC. The ANC has always claimed to be independent of the regional government, but never published its full accounts
In September 2012, Mas called a snap election for November after a massive pro-independence demonstration in Barcelona in September, which had been organised by Òmnium and the ANC. He bet on CiU’s ability to surf a rising populist wave. In the end, though, support for the establishment party fell, but Mas was able to cut a deal with ERC to stay in power. He tried and failed to negotiate a new financing regime for Catalonia with the national government; and then called a non-binding and unofficial referendum on independence for November 2014.
The Spanish-speaking pro-union majority stayed at home, mostly, on the day of the unofficial vote and the regional government shockingly didn’t give a turnout figure. Estimates ranged from 37.0% to 41.6%. The vast majority of the Catalan-speaking minority who did show up voted for independence. Mas rather improbably hailed the result as a masterclass in democracy.
Clearly, from Mas’ perspective, it was much better for the conversation to centre on the alleged benefits Catalan independence, without ever mentioning turnout figures or the risks of secession. Anything would be better than discussing Pujol’s offshore bank accounts or the multiple sleaze allegations against his party. He doubled down on populist nationalism in the years ahead. In 2017, he was banned from public office for organising the illegal vote in 2014.
Between 2012 and 2017, Pujol’s infiltration plan proved very successful in making life hard for critics of nationalism. Many citizens of Catalonia had long learnt to bite their tongues rather than pushing back against the independence movement’s relentless reliance on lies, exaggerations and half-truths to make its case. Indeed, one important characteristic of the independence movement was the “successful silencing of the majoritarian non-secessionist citizenry throughout most of the upsurge,” in the words of three academics who studied the issue.
In 2015, Mas cynically decided to go all in on populism, partly to deflect from the growing public awareness of CiU’s sleaze. He called an election in September of that year; and formed an alliance with ERC called Together for Yes (JxSí). He cynically described the election as a de-facto referendum, but never defined the terms, other than to say that the new platform would work towards independence. He also cynically wrapped himself in the Catalan flag, sticking out four fingers on each hand to refer to the flag’s origin myths, and used a cynically populist slogan: “The will of a people.” You might think I am over-using the words “cynical” and “cynically” in this paragraph, but no. I am probably not using them enough!
JxSí massively over-represented people with distinctive Catalan surnames in its lists, which had a very nativist flavour that would have shocked Tarradellas. Even so, it won the election with 39.6%, down considerably from the combined 44.4% for CiU and ERC three years previously. Despite falling short of a true majority, Mas cynically declared the result was a true victory for independence.
Catalonia’s electoral law under-emphasises votes in Barcelona, where Catalan nationalism is weak, and over-emphasises votes in other provinces, where it is strong. As a result, JxSí got 62 seats out of 135. Another pro-independence party, Popular Unity Candidacy (la CUP), got ten seats on 8.2%. Of course, 62 plus ten is 72, which is a majority of the Catalan parliament, even if 39.6% plus 8.2% falls short of a majority with 47.8%. To a cynical politician like Mas, all this maths is just nitpicking.
La CUP is an ultra-populist party that combines far-left and nationalist themes. It was popular with hippies with inherited wealth and anarchists. It ran for the first time in 2003 in ten municipalities. It decided to contest the regional elections in 2012, before doing better than expected in 2015.
To their credit, la CUP’s leaders publicly discussed the lack of a true majority for independence. While it was negotiating a deal with JxSí, Mas publicly threatened to reveal who had financed the party in recent years unless it played ball. The party sat down to negotiate a deal with JxSí, but with conditions.
Both sides cut a deal in January 2016; and Mas never said how la CUP had managed to gain so much support in such a short time. Both sides agreed to run a new illegal referendum, which would be binding. As part of the deal, Mas agreed to step aside. La CUP and JxSí agreed that Carles Puigdemont, one of a handful of true populists within CiU, should be the new First Minister. He had been born in 1962 and worked as a journalist in Catalan nationalist newspapers despite lacking a university degree. He had been mayor of Girona for five years at the time.
Where Mas was cynical, Puigdemont was a naive and simple-minded true believer. He infamously declared that he would ignore those judges who warned him that he was about to break a series of significant laws with serious penalties. Spoiler alert: this is never going to be a good idea.
During 2016 and 2017, the Catalan nationalist side tried to impose a single vision of reality on a diverse population, with the help of an army of Russian bots. It had an Orwellian approach to language. “Self-determination” was re-interpreted to mean “secession”; while “democracy” was used to mean “populism”; a liberal constitution was assumed to be in some essential way fascistic; and the risks of capital flight or recession were rarely discussed in a spirit of openness and transparency. Opponents of the madness were routinely smeared as fascists and Spanish nationalists.
A lot of the hysteria of the time were designed to draw the world’s attention from an inconvenient fact: the laws to approve the referendum in September 2017 were clearly an illegal coup attempt.
We all know what happened next. The referendum of October 2017 was marked by serious irregularities; the police took a heavy-handed approach in breaking up the referendum; most Barcelona-based multinationals fled the region; the Spanish government used Article 155 of the Constitution to temporarily end the region’s devolved powers and call a new election; the Catalan nationalist leaders were charged with a coup attempt; Puigdemont ran away; and there was a massive demonstration against independence in Barcelona in November.
Puigdemont led a new platform, grouping the populist elements within CiU, called Together for Catalonia (Junts) to second place in the elections in December, while ERC came third. ERC later overtook Junts in 2021 and was also able to form a weak government after coming second.
Until Illa became First Minister in early August, first Junts and then ERC have tried to govern the region despite lacking clear majorities or any semblance of a sensible plan in the aftermath of the failure of their coup attempt, which one senior separatist publicly described as a bluff.
ERC’s position has been helped by PM Pedro Sánchez’s need for populist votes in Madrid since 2018; while Junts was thrown a lifeline by the general election in July 2023. Sánchez needs the party’s seven votes in Madrid to stay in power after coming second in the general election, despite publicly (and correctly) describing Puigdemont’s hand-picked successor as a member of the far right. He designed an amnesty for Puigdemont, but judges are refusing to apply it for embezzlement (one of many crimes that Puigdemont is accused of committing during his coup attempt).
In the meantime, support for independence has been slowly ebbing in Catalonia for years. Most young people couldn’t care less; many of the Spanish-speaking majority still feel that the Catalan government has never truly listened to their concerns; immigrants are notable by their absence in pro-independence circles; and Puigdemont’s decision to run away in 2017 made significant numbers of former supporters of independence feel that they were being taken for a ride.
It is interesting that Illa’s Socialists received 28.0% of the vote in May. This is almost exactly the same as the 27.8% that Pujol got in 1980. Will Illa be able to turn his first stint in power with a minority government into the basis for decades in power? I think it would be a reasonable bet. Illa is just 58, which is just a little older than Pujol in 1980 (he was nearly 50 when he won power for the first time). One risk factor is a growing scandal about the procurement of health material during the pandemic when Illa was Sánchez’s health minister in 2018, but so far it appears a distant threat.
Although Illa is mostly a technocrat, with a philosophy degree to his name, there is also a populist element to his current offering. He promised ERC a new financing regime for Catalonia, which looks very similar to what Mas failed to deliver in 2013 and 2014. At the time of writing, it looks very difficult for Socialist PM Sánchez to get this over the line - he has a minority government and many of his allies hate the plan, which would involve higher taxes elsewhere in Spain.
If Sánchez is unsuccessful in delivering a new financing regime, I think it reinforces Illa’s case that only the Socialists can deliver results for Catalonia. Many Catalan-nationalist voters are gradually realising that only parties that are strong in both Madrid and Barcelona will be able to play the game. Being strong in Barcelona but weak in Madrid is a mug’s game. On the other hand, if Sánchez is able to pull a rabbit out of a hat, the Socialists will be able to steal many more Catalan-nationalist votes from ERC, la CUP and even Junts in the years ahead.
The key to Illa’s strategic positioning is an open secret that is rarely discussed outside Spain: a large percentage of the voters for separatist parties during the independence movement’s pomp weren’t full-blown supporters of independence. Many voters saw the movement as a way of putting pressure on Madrid to get a better deal for Catalonia. These voters have been moving in mass to the Socialist party. We can track the shift in regional election results. In 2017, the three main separatist parties got just under 2.1m votes between them in the regional elections while the Socialists received 0.6m. By 2024, though, the separatists parties were down to a combined 1.2m (a drop of 0.9m), while the Socialists were on 0.9m (a gain of nearly 0.3m votes).
It is particularly noteworthy that Illa’s Socialists have been able to appeal to both Spanish speakers and Catalan speakers. The party won in Barcelona, its outskirts and in Tarragona, while coming second in the heartland of Catalan independence. The Catalan branch of the Socialists have accepted some Catalan-nationalist narratives, like the idea that the region deserves a special fiscal treatment, while declining to accept the movement’s populist conclusions about the need to smash up one of the building blocks of the European Union (EU).
Illa (who is a practising Catholic) has publicly tipped his hat to Tarradellas by picking a historic monastery to announce his strategy. It is no coincidence that it is the same monastery that holds Tarradellas’ archive (the late politician never renounced his Catholicism, although he rarely went to church). Looking further back, in 2018, Sánchez’s government renamed Barcelona’s airport after the late politician before Illa became health minister.
Illa publicly promised to govern on behalf of “all Catalans” when he accepted the post. The underlying implication - that the Socialists agree with Tarradellas that Catalonia is too small to look down on any of its children and big enough that there is a space for all its citizens - should be clear. The comments are closed, as always when I criticise populist narratives. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I can. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Puigdemont’s disappearing act and Catalan demographics
Can Catalan nationalism be left wing?
Catalan nationalism and Franco
A short history of ethno-nationalism and why the ideology is dangerous
Linguistic hysteria and the current situation
Catalan-nationalist infiltation of the region’s institutions
Institutionalism and its enemies
Capital flight (part one and part two)
Sánchez’s strategy for Catalonia
Further Reading
Spanish speakers can read the full version of Tarradellas’ letter here
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