Increasingly hardline Catalan separatists are taking advantage of the void left by the decapitation of the region’s independence movement to step up their protests by blocking roads and clashing with police, raising fears of radicalization, analysts said.
Spanish authorities have jailed nine Catalan separatist leaders and called for the extradition of six others who have fled abroad, including Catalonia’s former president Carles Puigdemont, who was arrested on Sunday in Germany.
This crackdown on the independence movement’s established leaders “generates incentives for the adoption of a hardline” by radical separatists, said Berta Barbet, politics professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
“Since the conflict is increasingly more raw and social divisions are greater, the risk of radicalization is ever more real,” she added.
However, Barbet said she did not believe Spain would see a return to the armed violence that plagued the country when Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) and Catalan nationalist group Terra Lliure were active.
ETA, accused of killing more than 800 people in a decades-long campaign of bombings and shootings to establish an independent Basque state, announced it was disarming in April last year.
Terra Lliure, which disbanded in 1995, committed its only killing with a bomb attack in 1987.
After years of peaceful protests in Catalonia in favor of independence, demonstrations on Sunday against Puigdemont’s arrest led to clashes with police that left about 100 people injured.
Catalan police decked out in riot gear shoved and hit demonstrators with batons to keep the crowd from advancing on the office of the Madrid government’s representative in Barcelona.
Demonstrators set fire to recycling containers and threw glass bottles, cans and eggs at authorities.
Despite appeals for calm from some separatist leaders, the protests called by the radical Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) continued on Tuesday with protesters blocking major motorways in the wealthy northeastern region of Spain.
“The Catalan spring has erupted,” the group said in a statement on Sunday, in a reference to a series of protests which began in Arab nations in 2011.
“We have crossed the point of no return ... we will reappropriate the streets and stop the country,” the statement added in a call for a general strike in Catalonia like the ones held late last year when the region’s separatist crisis heated up.
During those strikes demonstrators blocked dozens of roads across Catalonia and forced the closure of key tourist spots such as Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familia church.
The legal action against Catalan separatists “is activating the social movement in the streets again, reinforcing it and making it more tense,” said Jordi Amat, an author of several essays on the independence movement.
The failure of Catalonia’s unilateral declaration of independence, which led Spain’s central government to take direct control of the region in October last year and launch the crackdown on separatist leaders, has caused the pro-independence movement to change strategy, he added.
Whereas before the goal was to “gain legitimacy internationally,” now “the only strategy they can use is destabilization” of the Spanish state, Amat said.
This explains why Catalan separatist lawmakers, who regained their absolute majority in the Catalan parliament at snap polls in December last year, keep proposing candidates for regional president who are disqualified by their legal problems such as Puigdemont, he added.
“For many separatists, this destabilization also should be taken to the streets ... there is a will to paralyze the mechanics of the state,” Amat said.
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