BARCELONA: Catalans voted Thursday in a crucial election that could mark a turning point for their region, just two months after a failed secession bid triggered Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
High turnout was expected in a vote pitting leaders of the wealthy northeastern region’s separatist movement against parties that want to remain in Spain.
Will voters again hand victory to pro-independence parties that tried to break Catalonia from Spain, one of whose candidates is in jail and the other in self-imposed exile in Belgium?
Or will they lose the absolute parliamentary majority of 72 seats they won in 2015?
Catalans on both sides of the divide saw the day as a potential moment of truth for their region, following weeks of upheaval and protests unseen since democracy was reinstated following the death in 1975 of dictator Franco.
“Today’s vote is about whether we say yes or no to independence in Catalonia,” said Gloria Garcia, a telephone operator in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a working class suburb of Barcelona.
While the independence question is far from new, it was the banned referendum on October 1 — and a heavy police crackdown on voters — that focused the world’s attention on the region.
Some 5.5 million people are registered to vote in Thursday’s election which is likely to see seven parties winning mandates in the 135-seat regional parliament.
Polls showed that around a million voters remained undecided on the eve of election day, with many Catalans exhausted of the crisis and yearning for a return to normality.
The Spanish government called the vote after stripping Catalonia of its treasured autonomy, in response to a failed independence declaration by the region’s parliament on October 27.
But the secession bid was short-lived as Madrid sacked Catalonia’s government, dissolved its parliament and called snap elections.
Crucially, however, even if the pro-independence camp wins, it is not expected to attempt another breakaway from Spain but rather try to enter into negotiations with Madrid.
To separatists, the vote is in part an opportunity to strengthen their hand in the standoff with Madrid.
In the staunchly pro-independence town of Vic, 49-year-old professor Alex Arroyo said he had never really supported the separatist cause.
But he changed his mind “because of the Spanish state’s radical positions” and because of the “violence ... on referendum day.”
Supporters of the pro-unity camp also see the election as crucial, with the centrist Ciudadanos expected to win the most seats out of the anti-independence parties.
“The issue for me is that we are all Spanish, and Ciudadanos can be the change we need to firmly maintain the unity of Spain,” said Garcia, the telephone operator, wearing the red-and-yellow Spanish flag around her neck.
The lead-up to voting day was marked by huge protests by hundreds of thousands by people on both sides of the divide.
It also saw axed Catalan President Carles Puigdemont flee to Belgium, avoiding detention on charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds for his role in the independence drive.
He had hoped the EU would rally to the separatists’ cause — but that never materialized, with the bloc already rattled by Britain’s decision to leave.
Puigdemont has since campaigned virtually, holding rallies via videolink.
“Today we will show, once again, the strength of an indomitable people,” he tweeted Thursday.
His deputy Oriol Junqueras remained in Spain and was jailed along with others pending an investigation into the same charges.
Opinion polls suggest Junqueras’s leftist ERC party could win, though it is unclear whether he or his deputy Marta Rovira would be named president.
“Hope is what guides us today, bearing in mind that many people today aren’t able to exercise their democratic rights, the first among them Oriol Junqueras,” Rovira told reporters as she cast her ballot.
Over on the other side, Ciudadanos is close to ERC according to polls and some suggest it could win under Ines Arrimadas, a charismatic 36-year-old.
Supporters of Arrimadas cheered “presidenta! presidenta!” as she voted.
“We have worked very hard in the past few years as opposition leaders in the (regional) parliament, and today we hope to reap the fruits of our labor,” she said.
Participation stood at 34.7 percent by the early afternoon, official data showed — just short of the 2015 record.
At stake in the vote is the economy of a region that has seen its tourism sector suffer and more than 3,000 companies moved their legal headquarters since the referendum.
Catalans vote in bid to solve independence crisis
Catalans vote in bid to solve independence crisis
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
