Catalan independence leaders await sentencing.

Originally published in Octubre (10/15/19)

The ruling of the Supreme Court, which sentences the Catalan independence leaders to long prison terms, reflects the repressive nature of the monarchical regime. As much as the president of the acting government insists on spreading the idea that Spain is an example of a rule of law in which equality prevails before the law and the independence of the judicial system, the truth is that the decision of the Supreme Court It is clearly political. Legal arguments only attempt to mask an obvious fact: what is condemned, what is repressed, is the exercise of a democratic right, that of self-determination, contained in numerous United Nations documents.

This sentence, which will have far-reaching political consequences when opening a deep fracture with Catalonia, represents a qualitative leap in the progressive degradation and limitation of civil rights and democratic freedoms in our country. Spain is not a democracy. There is a parliamentary artifice, a seemingly democratic facade behind which lies an oligarchic power that rules outside and against popular interests. The monarchy, heiress of Franco, is nothing more than the vault key of a corrupt system that was created in the years of the so-called democratic transition.

The national question in Spain, like other structural problems, cannot find a solution in the current constitutional and political framework. The right is involved in a false patriotism that hides tax fraud, capital concealment in tax havens and runaway corruption. Spain is his farm. The defense of the unity of Spain is nothing more than the defense of its class interests. But the institutional left also offers no solutions because its political horizon has the 1978 Constitution as its limits.

The incendiary speeches of Ciudadanos, Vox and also of the Popular Party against the Catalan people indicate a very dangerous drift in the Spanish right, an inclination towards open fascism or towards philosophical positions. It is necessary to denounce and combat those positions. Spanish nationalism only tries to divide workers by promoting hatred and discord.

The Catalan people have the right to choose their political future. The PCE (ml) defends the right of self-determination of nationalities, exercised through a referendum with all legal guarantees. But that democratic exercise cannot be achieved within the current political and constitutional order. It is not true, as the monarchist politicians affirm, that within the Constitution all rights can be defended and all claims raised as long as they are expressed peacefully. The repression exerted in Catalonia is the most obvious sign that it is not so.

Only a political break with the monarchy, only the proclamation of the People’s and Federative Republic will allow historical nationalities to decide their fit in the whole of Spain. Let us forge the popular unity that will put an end to a regime that condemns millions of Spaniards to unemployment and poverty, which violates freedoms and mortgages national sovereignty by subordinating our country to US imperialism.

The PCE (ml) condemns this sentence that only aims to repress democratic rights, demands the freedom of Catalan political prisoners and denounces the repression that the monarchist state is exercising in Catalonia.

October 15, 2019

Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Spain (Marxist-Leninist )

Categories: International, Spain