L’Catalan independence suffered a severe blow, the umpteenth. The resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and premier of Scotland, the first woman to combine both offices, also have an impact on the Catalonia question. Every great political battle leads to the identification of historical and cultural references, to give strength to the ideas advocated and to emulate deeds that make the goal appear possible. Catalan independence has directed its gaze mainly to internal events in the United Kingdom where it Ourselves and the party led until last February by Mrs. Sturgeon have placed the independence of Ireland and Scotland at the center of the debate.
In recent years, when the Catalan question has become central to Spanish politics, it has not been difficult to see the St. Andrew crossthe Scottish flag, waving on the balconies of Barcelona or in the massive processions of the Diada, the September party of independence. He hit the stubbornness of the Scots and the ability, fruit of a persistent action, alongside the British government, to obtain a referendum to express itself on the detachment from London.
That 2014 consultation represented for the Catalans the compass that points the direction of good politics. Seized by emulative anxiety three years later, in October 2017, Carlos Puigdemont e Oriol Junqueras, gave rise to an unrecognized referendum, indeed expressly opposed by Madrid and the Constitutional Tribunal. It was the beginning of a clear decline, the Catalan leaders failing to grasp that a preliminary negotiation with London, the Edinburgh Agreement, was the core of the Scottish independence party’s political initiative. There Generalitat preferred arm wrestling to negotiation, choosing the path ofunilateralism. Arrests followed, trials against the entire ruling class, exiles and finally lacerations in the same front in favor of separation from Madrid.
Now the Scottish way also falls apart, Nicola Sturgeon has always pursued endorsed solutions from the seal of legality by loudly invoking the possibility of another consultation, despite all the polls still attributing the majority to unionists. The Conservative government has turned its back on this time Scotland National Partymoreover, the premise underlying the previous agreement provided that those 2014 elections were “just, legal and decisive”.
And the dream of one new consultation has broken, who knows definitively, on the 35 pages of the ruling of the Supreme Court which observed that the Edinburgh Parliament cannot exercise legislative power in the matter without the prior authorization of Westminster. A dead-end road that, according to analysts, would have led to resignation which leave a pile of rubble in the family of Scottish independence activists and many orphans in the rooms of Catalan politics.