Unsurprisingly – for those of us who live there – Catalonia’s most viewed online news site (vilaweb.cat) and most-read pro-independence newspaper (El Punt Avui) both highlighted the Scottish election results.
This is not least because in her post-election speech Ms Sturgeon pointed out that the party which swept the board in England is in an unloved minority in Scotland – a situation which is exactly comparable to that in Catalonia.
There, where, in November’s general election, the pro-independence parties won 43 per cent of the vote (if we add the votes of the left-leaning En Comu Podem, who are opposed to independence but would be happy to see a negotiated referendum, that figure rises to 57%). And the unionist, anti-referendum parties – for whom 72% of the electorate voted in Spain – received just 39,85% of the Catalan vote.
Ms Sturgeon added that not all Scottish people wanted independence, but that a majority clearly did want a referendum on the issue. In Catalonia, polls held regularly since 2017 show that between 77% and 82% of the Catalan population also want a referendum too.
There, however, the similarities end. Whereas the Scottish, in the lead-up to their first referendum, did not deem it necessary to organise massive demonstrations or to bedeck the entire country with saltires, the Catalans held yearly demonstrations of between one and two million people in Barcelona, according to city police figures, (and Catalonia has a population of just seven and a half million). Pro-independence flags were hung – and are still hanging – in every city district, town and village.
And two different Catalan presidents made 14 formal attempts to negotiate a referendum with the then-Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy.
In most other countries, a central government would have paid at least some attention to all this genuinely popular, as opposed to populist furore – especially when the then-Catalan president Carles Puigdemont declared that the only solution to the impasse was to hold a referendum, come what may.
But instead of trying to deal politically with the Catalan situation, Madrid adopted an oddly contradictory strategy.
On the one hand, Mr Rajoy calmly assured every visiting foreign dignitary he could lay his hands on that “an overwhelming majority of Catalans wish to remain in Spain”. The Spanish government spokesperson Mendez de Vigo assured his concerned domestic audience, equally calmly, that the referendum – which took place on October 1, 2017 – would be nothing but a “picnic”.
On the other hand, 6,000 extra police were bussed into Catalonia, where they set about raiding Catalan government offices and detaining Catalan civil servants in a visibly desperate attempt to locate voting papers and ballot boxes (they found some of the former and none of the latter).
Oh, and the referendum itself turned out to be anything but a picnic.
Throughout the pre-referendum period, op-eds in the Catalan media repeated time and again that the Scottish were so lucky as they only had London to contend with, meaning a government that respected democracy; whereas they had to deal with Madrid, meaning a bloody-minded, traditionally catalanophobic regime that still hadn’t shaken off the mental trappings of the dictatorship from which it emerged.
READ MORE: Protests erupt as Spain convicts leading Catalan separatists
But since the UK General Election, many Catalans are curious to see how Scotland will react now that it is as much at loggerheads with the British English Prime Minister as they are with the Spanish one.
For example, the above-mentioned news site Vilaweb excitedly cited The Herald last Saturday, when Ms Sturgeon insisted that Scotland had to have a second referendum, even though Boris Johnson had stated – just as the current Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez states most days of the week – that there was no way it was going to have one.
In short, many Catalans feel sure that Scotland will do what they did in 2017: have a referendum willy-nilly, because that is what the people want.
And they’re also sure that if the referendum is suspended by the law courts – as was the Catalan one – the English will not send in militarised police yelling “Let’s get ‘em!”. Nor will they beat voters up and send over a thousand of them to hospital; nor will they arrest most of the Scottish Government (and the Speaker of the Scottish Parliament plus a couple of local civic leaders) and force the rest of it into exile; nor will they sentence those detained to sentences longer than those habitually handed out to rapists and murderers; nor will they start rounding up random activists and accusing them of being terrorists without a scintilla of proof; and nor, for that matter, will they refuse point blank to have bilateral talks with the First Minister.
In other words, even though Downing Street is occupied by a dyed-in-the-wool Unionist, Catalans still think the Scottish will show the world that you can defy a central government and that the same central government won’t use violence (and wilful deafness) to stop them.
The Scottish, in a nutshell, could set a liberating precedent not only for the majority of Catalans who want a referendum, but also for the Spanish Government. Here’s hoping.
Matthew Tree is a writer who has had 11 books published in Catalan, his second language.
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