Voters in Catalonia could cause crisis for Brussels

Voters in Catalonia could cause crisis for Brussels



The poll result in Catalonia is a disaster for the Spanish government. But voters in Spain’s most restive region have also presented the EU with a full-blown crisis that could threaten its very existence.



By ignoring the European Commission’s preference for pro-Madrid candidates and returning a majority of separatists, the people of Catalonia have not only displayed contempt for Brussels but put the commission in an almost impossible position.



When the crisis in Catalonia exploded at the start of October with the Spanish government’s crackdown on a locally organised referendum on independence, Brussels came out four-square behind Madrid, even justifying the violence used by police against separatist demonstrators. Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker firmly rejected Catalan separatists’ demands for a democratic vote on their region’s status.



By interfering in this way, Mr Juncker turned the Catalan issue into a European crisis rather than just a Spanish one.



Euro federalists warned of the dire consequences of any moves towards an independent Catalonia. If the region chose independence, they said, it would be thrown out of the euro and the EU.



Yet as this week’s poll made clear, the separatists in Catalonia paid no heed to such threats. They weren’t prepared to be bullied by either the Spanish government or by Brussels.



As citizens of Spain’s richest region, Catalans have long been resentful at seeing so much of their taxes disappear to Madrid to ‘subsidise’, as they see it, the rest of the country. But economics are only part of the crisis. The Catalans’ sense of ‘self’ is ferociously strong: they are defined by their own language, culture, cuisine and by a long tradition of defying Madrid.





Although the commission likes to talk a lot about democracy as a European value, it defines this as what Brussels wants, rather than what the people want. Time and again, with a ballot paper in front of them, a majority of voters – from those in Denmark who rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum in 1992, to Britain last year and now Catalonia this week – have ticked the wrong box.



I am not sure that Catalan independence is a good idea any more than Scotland’s breakaway from the UK might be, but the choice is surely for the people affected.



Nothing displayed the EU’s blithe disregard for democracy better than the reaction to the Catalan vote by the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt. He completely ignored the fact that the three separatist parties had won a total of 70 seats in the 135-seat regional parliament – ensuring a separatist majority – and instead congratulated the pro-Spanish Citizens party which gained 37 seats, admittedly making it the largest single party but one in no position of power.



The trouble for the EU is that resentment over this ‘democratic deficit’ is growing daily. Across Europe – from Austria, where the anti-EU far-Right Freedom Party is now part of the coalition government, to Eastern European EU nations such as Poland and Hungary, which are visceral in their opposition to EU immigration policies – Brussels is increasingly coming up against the anger of voters.



In Poland, Brussels has inflamed that anger by moving to suspend the country’s voting rights in the EU after a dispute over judicial reforms that Brussels claims undermine Polish courts’ independence.



This attempt by the EU to make Warsaw its whipping boy – as though Eastern European members should take their subsidies and in return do the commission’s bidding – has appalled Hungary, which has now come out in support of Poland.





Unsurprisingly, Brussels refuses to take responsibility for provoking this rising tide of nationalism in Europe. But it has been the commission’s contempt for local electorates that has repeatedly fuelled it.



The trouble is that the inflammatory nature of the Catalan crisis – where the risks of violence are real and the memory of brutal civil war is undimmed – has boxed the EU into a corner.



Whichever way Brussels now turns, it risks alienating huge swathes of public opinion. If it backtracks from supporting Madrid, Spanish nationalists will be outraged. But switching to sympathy for Catalan separatism risks opening another can of worms. Not only would that infuriate Madrid, but also the governments of many European countries that face similar discontentment from regional breakaway movements.



Even France’s obsessively pro-EU government faced embarrassment last week when nationalists swept the board in the Corsican elections, calling for the island’s independence from Paris.



That is why Spain’s crisis is not just a headache for Madrid, but a symptom of a crisis across the EU – and if it is not handled with utmost care, it could tear the cherished European dream of Messrs Juncker and Co apart.



Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford.