Hundreds of thousands of Catalans took to the streets of Barcelona on Tuesday in an unprecedented show of mass support for autonomy from Madrid, blaming Spain’s economic crisis for dragging their wealthy region down.
Surging unemployment and financial disarray have stoked a fever of separatism in Catalonia, a comparatively prosperous part of Spain, whose leaders say their wealth is being sucked dry by the central government.
Crowds waved red and yellow striped Catalan flags — one of the oldest still in use in Europe — and sang the Catalan anthem on a national day marking the conquest of Catalonia by Spanish King Philip V in 1714 after a 13-month siege of Barcelona.
Photo: Reuters
The central government said the crowd was 600,000 strong. Catalan police gave figures as high as 1.5 million.
Marchers said the sheer size of the crowd — swollen with people from around the region who descended on its capital in bright sunshine — would at last make Madrid hear their message.
“This is a blow for the government. People like me came from everywhere. I don’t think they were expecting something as big,” said 53-year-old Teresa Cabanes, who traveled from Santa Coloma de Gramanet, on the outskirts of Barcelona, to march. “We feel that the central government is fooling with us. We Catalans are giving away a lot of money to Spain.”
The huge volume of people overwhelmed the mobile phone network, which shut down for hours under the strain. Marchers who had attended Catalan national day rallies for decades, including others that attracted hundreds of thousands, said it was the biggest they could recall.
The march ended after nightfall without any incident and no people were arrested, police said.
The show of anger and ethnic pride will play into the hands of regional authorities, who are trying to force the central government to yield control over taxes raised in Catalonia.
Catalans speak a language similar to, but distinct from, the Castilian Spanish spoken in the rest of Spain. The region accounts for 15 percent of Spain’s population, but 20 percent of its economy.
With Spain’s economy in free fall due to the eurozone debt crisis, Catalans complain of paying billions of euros more in taxes than they receive back from Madrid, even as their regional government has been forced to fire workers and cut services.
The region’s president, Artur Mas, has suggested he could seek independence if he is not given more control over tax raised from Catalonia.
“If we cannot reach a financial agreement, the road to freedom for Catalonia is open,” he said on Tuesday.
Mas did not attend the march, but said he backed it in spirit.
The annual Diada holiday is typically commemorated with a fiesta in the Catalan capital, with song, dance and a floral offerings to Rafael Casanova, a hero of the siege, but the outpouring on Tuesday was a sign that the economic crisis has transformed issues of cultural identity into a mainstream political movement bent on autonomy.
A poll by the regional government in July showed for the first time that more than half of Catalonia’s population favors independence.
For Mas and his nationalist Convergence and Union party, that translates into demands for control over taxes.
When Spain returned to democracy in the mid-1970s, regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country saw a vibrant resurgence of their culture and languages that had been crushed during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Economists calculate Catalans pay at least 12 billion euros more in taxes per year to Madrid than they receive back for services such as schools and hospitals. Many Catalans say the figure — difficult to calculate because of a complex system of transfers — is even higher, up to 16 billion.
“A lot of people who were not into independence are more and more into it now,” said Elvira Farre, a retired secretary from Barcelona. “They are being driven into it by their feelings, but also by their wallets.”
Government worker Jauma Turra said: “It’s like a marriage you can’t put up with anymore.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.