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Police and would-be voters have clashed during a Catalan independence referendum held on Sunday:
Scenes of chaos and violence unfolded in Catalonia as an independence referendum deemed illegal by Madrid devolved quickly on Sunday. As police followed orders from the central government to put a stop to the vote, they fired rubber bullets at unarmed protesters and smashed through the glass at polling places, reports The Associated Press. Three hundred and thirty-seven people were injured, some seriously, according to Catalonia's government spokesman.
Spain's Interior Ministry said a dozen police officers were injured. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from Barcelona that some people were throwing rocks down at officers from balconies. Yet the violence came from all directions.
"Horrible scenes," Lauren reports. "Police dragging voters out of polling stations, some by the hair."
Scuffles erupted as riot police forcefully removed hundreds of would-be voters from polling places across Barcelona, the Catalan capitol, reports AP. Nevertheless, many people, managed to successfully cast their ballots across the region after waiting in lines hundreds-of-people-deep, including the elderly and families with small children, says Reuters.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said that he did not acknowledge the vote and called it "illegal".
Also at NYT, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and BBC:
Catalan emergency officials say 761 people have been injured as police used force to try to block voting in Catalonia's independence referendum.
Update: Catalan referendum: Catalonia has 'won right to statehood'
Spain Vows to Enforce the Law in Rebel Catalonia
Catalonia Leaders Seek to Make Independence Referendum Binding
Previously: Spain Trying to Stop Catalonia Independence Referendum
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 03 2017, @01:49PM (11 children)
However, Spain fucked up big time. They are one of the last western countries to be remembered (living memory, not history) having a dictatorship, and their behaviour has been heading back towards that level intollerence of dissent. However, they're not the most fucked up country in the western world (I'm looking at you whose abbreviations start with a "U"), so they might get away with it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by Kawumpa on Tuesday October 03 2017, @02:15PM
You are right, but this still won't stop politicians using it for increasingly bad policy. Look at the UK and Brexit: They had an official referendum, which was advisory only, hence the lack of measures like minimum participation, super majority etc. like they mandated for the Scottish referendum. Consequently many people didn't take it as seriously as they should have and didn't bother to vote. Now the government is using this poll and the opinion of just 37% of a part of the electorate as justification to strip citizens of their rights. One could call that a coup.
Let's see what they will do in Spain.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday October 03 2017, @02:46PM (3 children)
As you say though, Madrid fucked up big time; if they'd been able to achieve the same poor turnout without such heavy handed tactics then they'd have the high ground at this point, but instead they've come across as a brutal dictators with shades of Franco trampling over a peaceful protest that neither they nor they EU recognised. The latter is particularly important given that Catalonia hopes to join the EU, which would clearly be impossible without both the EU recognising them as a sovereign state and Spain not using their EU membership veto to bar Catalonia's entry.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 03 2017, @03:57PM (1 child)
Madrid is in a pickle. They screwed the pooch in Spain, but did they also screw the pooch for the EU? Does the EU sit it out and let Spain sort out its own mess, or do they side with Madrid as the official holder of that country's vote in the EU? If the EU intervenes on the side of Catalonia, how long before the Basques split off from Madrid and Paris (the Basque region straddles the border), and separatist movements pick up speed in other EU member states? Belgium would probably have split in half a while ago if Brussels weren't the host city for the EU; the Flemish and Walloons hate each other.
It's hard to imagine the Catalans taking up arms against Madrid, but I don't think mass strikes and protests are going to get them anywhere. Do they sever bridges and roads and throw officials from Madrid out of the region?
How emotionally invested are Spaniards from Valencia and Galicia in keeping the Catalans in the union, too? Do they care that much? Are they willing to forcibly repress the Catalans?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @03:31AM
How pressed are Catalans to keep on with it while companies move out, study plans to do so, or at least raise concerns? (Similar to Brexit, BTW. Let's do a drama, and once it passes, start looking for a plan because there was none before, at least none thinking about the consequences.) Factories are harder to move, but don't discard it... or maybe multinationals will take advantage of it in next job cuts round, saving many jobs in other places.
Three quick examples:
https://elpais.com/ccaa/2017/10/03/catalunya/1507048764_007271.html [elpais.com] Oryzon biotech moves to Madrid.
http://www.elmundo.es/economia/2017/10/03/59d3dbf1ca474164208b45b0.html [elmundo.es] CaixaBank ties decissions to customers'.
http://www.larazon.es/espana/el-presidente-de-mercadona-asustado-y-preocupado-por-la-situacion-en-cataluna-BC16413929 [larazon.es] Owner of supermarkets covering all Spain is worried, also because new train route covering Mediterranean would be cut.
As a commenter said in a newspaper, Spain is going to suffer, but Catalonia way more.
BTW, it seems international news don't cover much detail of who is behind. A good chunk of the noise comes from self declared anticapitalists. They only have 10/135 seats in the Parlament, but are very vocal. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatura_d%27Unitat_Popular_(CUP) [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Unity_Candidacy [wikipedia.org] and while checking those pages, the ideas look great "in paper"... but the actions of past days seem to devolve into mob rule, with no dissidence allowed. Tuesday was a strike day on Catalonia, and people that wanted to work had issues to do so.
And how does it work with getting back into EU (or, in wet dreams, not leaving at all) as the other part of separatists (the irony...) want? With 29/135 seats PDeCat is proEurope https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partido_Dem%C3%B3crata_Europeo_Catal%C3%A1n [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_European_Democratic_Party [wikipedia.org] (yes, "young" party, because the previous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Convergence_of_Catalonia [wikipedia.org] got bogged down in the 3% and Pujol corruption, so they needed a face change). CUP and JxSi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junts_pel_S%C3%AD [wikipedia.org] (CDC-PDeCat plus others, totalling 62/135) joined efforts to split from Spain, then... what?
Nationwide reporters that always were taken as pro Catalan, pro Left, or to sum up, anti Madrid, are also becoming a target for mobs. http://www.elmundo.es/television/2017/10/03/59d3c0b146163f7d528b4602.html [elmundo.es]
It's a cluster fuck even inside each side (other time I could talk about the "Madrid parties", their bad decisions, internal splits, corruption...).
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday October 05 2017, @03:38PM
This. A thousand times this. Any referendum should have an a priori turnout requirement.
Similarly, such impactful decisions should be decided with supermajority, not 50% + 1.
Note that either of these requirements would have killed Brexit, and any sensible turnout requirement would have killed the Catalan referendum.
Sure, some folks were prevented from voting - but, any sensible turnout requirement would be so far beyond the current turnout, that it's not "some folks were prevented", but "we missed 50% of the votes".
(Note that being aware that you missed another 50% of the votes is in itself more than enough reason to not accept the outcome.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:14PM
However, they're not the most fucked up country in the western world (I'm looking at you whose abbreviations start with a "U")
Uruguay? (country code "UY")
Last I heard, it was a pretty decent place, probably one of the best in South America.
Now if you're thinking of the USA, what we just saw in Spain seems much more fucked up than the US. I can't imagine federal police (something we don't even have really, just national guard which can only be ordered in by the state governor, plus things like FBI/ATF which really don't have that much manpower) being sent in to stop an election in the US. They'd simply refuse to recognize it, possibly arrest some politicians. What Spain just did looks just like a dictatorship.
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:19AM (3 children)
Not sure it is as simple as that. Allegedly many, perhaps a majority, of those who _didn't_ support independence actually supported having the referendum, although they quite probably didn't turn out to vote, they wanted people to be able to do so. How those people now feel about Spain I don't know...
Additionally the low-40s turnout was in the face of the well documented massed police attempt to block off polling stations and prevent voting. Note that the estimate of confiscated votes is correct, and assuming they voted same way as the others, there would I think have been a (narrow) absolute majority for independence (i.e. >50% of registered voters). Given what we saw on video I am close to astounded that they got turnout so high, it shows a lot of planning and organisation went into it, and a _lot_ of popular support. If the Catalans have planned and execute the next steps as well as they did the vote, this is going to escalate fast.
Both Spain and Catalan leaders have boxed themselves into a corner: Rajoy just looks stupid claiming the vote didn't happen, he sees no voters, no violence, he should remember that when someone saw "no ships" it didn't end well for Spain; he doesn't have anything to offer the region except more repression as he previously opposed (and rolled back I think?) greater autonomy _within_ Spain thus feeding the Catalan independence movement. Puigdemont is now obliged to declare independence and escalate on a low turnout, having pledged he would do so.
The one set of people who could mediate and de-escalate are the EU leaders, because both sides want to work with them, but they are busy looking the other way as hard as they can and mumbling about "internal matters not our problem" (never stopped them before). It'll be tanks on the streets vs. crowds of people before they do anything, and possibly not even then.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday October 05 2017, @03:45PM (1 child)
While I think both sides would want to avoid that scenario, it seems evermore likely. :(
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 05 2017, @04:39PM
Widely reported that the army are being shipped in already. :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 07 2017, @02:07AM
There is a flaw in your logic: among several other defects in the voting method (I won't argue with the fact that many were caused by the referendum being illegal and thus authorities executing several judge-ordered measures to thwart it), the Catalan government changed the voting method 20 minutes before voting "officially" started so people would be able to vote in any of the polling stations instead of their assigned ones. That means that people that had their votes confiscated could simply go to another station and vote again, and most did - note that there are several documented cases of people voting several times in different stations without issues. This means that the chance that people that wanted to vote "yes" did not is very low, and it is very likely that only a marginal number of them actually didn't. It seems that at least a few voted more than once...
Again, there was no way the vote could be held with any kind of guarantees after Spain's authorities did all they could to dismantle its organization, but let's not pretend it is anywhere near trustworthy. As an example, the updated figures for the results released today by the Catalan government, which include the last 5% of votes, have added 23,793 votes total, 23,894 of which are "yes" votes... There are strong indicators for the Catalan government gaming the numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:19PM
says the guy that will probably have a grandson named Mohamed.