With 98% of the vote counted, reportedly (WaPo today) 52% of the vote in Catalonia has gone for pro-union (with Spain) parties, while 48% has gone for pro-secession parties. However, apparently the pro-secession parties have won a solid majority in the parliament. This looks to me like last year's US presidential election, where Trump was elected while losing the popular vote.
I do not know what will happen there, nor do I have some nice neat recommendation for what they should do. Obviously the province is deeply and sharply and closely split over the secession issue. This election will not resolve it. Presumably the new government will push more for independence, but the central government, along with pretty much all of the EU and most of the rest of the world pushing back.
I am on record already expressing my own lack of sympathy for this movement. They gain credibility when the central government arrests their leaders and sends in police to beat and arrest demonstraters. But they already have language and educational autonomy. The main thing they seem to want is not to have their tax monies going to poorer regions of Spain. In this they resemblr the neo-fascist separatist parties of northern Italy, even as they invoke ant-fascism for their movement based on former Spanish history. I am not impressed.
I find all this to be sad as I like Catalonia and especially Barcelona. I worry that like so many other places that were doing well and now are not due to internal conflicts, this could happen there also.
Barkley Rosser
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The Atlantic has an article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/what-catalonia-can-teach-the-united-states/549011/
The New History Institute sounds like quite a group:
"The institute claims, for instance, that Christopher Columbus was Catalan and not Italian, and that his first voyage to America in 1492 launched not from Andalusia but Catalonia. It also claims that Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, and Erasmus of Rotterdam were all Catalan. Such ludicrous claims serve a purpose: to reaffirm that Catalans possess a distinct culture and history, and that they have been victims “of the biggest robbery in History” by Spain."
They seem to have their own fake news or history.
The Columbus claim has long been made. There is a large public statue of him by the harbor in Barcelona.
When I posted on this previously I noted being very sympathetic to them in 1973 when Franco dictatorially ruled from Madrid and suppressed their language and culture. Last time I was there I saw the shoe being on the other foot and people being treated badly for speaking Castellano Spanish. I had pompous Catalan nationalists come on here and tell me that was not so, but I know what I saw and did not like it. Yet another nationalist movement with people acting like insufferable assholes in it.
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