So who won Sunday's big independence elections in Catalonia?

Well, everyone did. At least, that is, everybody has claimed some kind of victory. The truth? Well, the truth in the baffling world of Catalan politics is that they are all almost right. Almost.

Catalonia's "independentistes" - they tend not to like the term nationalists or separatists - on Sunday won a majority of seats, but not votes, in parliamentary elections widely billed as a proxy independence referendum.

Cue spinning. "Catalonia doesn't want to go," declared the staunchly unionist and centre-right ABC newspaper of Madrid. "The majority of Catalans say No to independence," added another Madrid title, El Mundo.

"Adeu, Espanya," countered El Punt Avui, a Catalan-language daily, on its wraparound splash. "Goodbye, Spain." Why was it so confident? Because the paper, which backs independence reckons Yes outvoted No by 1.9m to 1.6m.

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Confused? How can Yes both win and lose a proxy independence referendum? Well, because it depends how you count the "maybes"; this wasn't a straight two way fight like, say, Scotland's 2014 referendum.

Not everybody - not every party and certainly not every voter - in Catalonia was treating the elections as a plebiscite.

Now two avowedly Yes slates - the newly forged mainstream alliance Junts pel Sí or Together for Yes and the small leftist bloc CUP - did so.

Let's call them the Ayes. They got 48 or so per cent of the vote (not a majority as the Madrid papers and their political backers reported) and 72 of the 135 seats, a mandate to govern.

Many of their opponents of Junts pel Sí and CUP were explicitly anti-independence. Let's call them the Naws. They included the Ciutadans party, a new-look group that combines social justice rhetoric with a hardline on future expansion of the existing devolution in Catalonia. Ciutadans - or C's for short - were arguably the big winners on the night with 17.9 per cent of the vote. Add C's vote to that of the broadly federalist Socialists, the staunchly unionist Conservative PPC and you get, in the Punt Avui count, some 39 per cent for the Naws.

The trouble with this election: there is a third group of slates that can, arguably, be filed as "Mebbes Aye, Mebbes Naw".

Chief among this category is a single slate styled as "Catalunya Sí que es Pot" - or, roughly translated, "Catalonia, Yes we can" - which was pretty ambivalent on independence. It was made up of ragtag of alternative and anti-establishment parties, including Greens, eco-socialists and the once booming and now fading Podemos.

With the old Catalanista home rulers of Unió and other assorted slates, the total "mebbes aye, mebbes naw" vote was 11 per cent.

So, yes, Madrid's papers are right. With a Scottish-style vote still blocked, Catalan Yessers did not win an outright majority of the kind they need to pursue a unilateral declaration of independence. But they are also wrong: there was no majority vote against breakaway.

My view? Yes won. Not because they got the most votes or the most seats but because these elections have entirely recalibrated Catalan politics. Those mebbes aside, the nation's forces are now emphatically lined up for or against a clearly defined concept of independence. Game on.