On 1 October 2022, Catalonia commemorated the independence referendum of 1 October 2017. The highlight was the telematic link-up of the Catalan president in exile, Carles Puigdemont, to whom the assembled crowd shouted «President, President» frenetically, making it clear once again who is the true president of Catalonia in the eyes of the people.
The Catalan Council prepares Catalonia's independence from abroad. In doing so, it can take measures that are currently not possible for the Catalan government, which is also striving for state independence, within the Spanish state.
Increasingly, it seems to be apparent these weeks that larger and larger sections of the supporters of state sovereignty for Catalonia are not satisfied with the political course of the official Catalan government and are demanding the early realisation of the sovereignty of their country in the form of a democratically constituted republic. Criticism of the established political parties is growing. However, President Carles Puigdemont is still the president of the hearts, and many Catalans trust him and the Catalan Council he leads to push the independence process forward and bring it to a good end.
Below is a translation of the speech that President Carles Puigdemont addressed to his people on 1 October 2022. It is and remains a disgrace for the European Union that it not only does not support this politician, that it does not support this people, that it does not support its own citizens of the Union who demand the human rights to which they are entitled, but on the contrary, it assists the Spanish state in its attempt to put down the Catalan revolution. History will judge all those who show in these years how little the human rights of a European people mean to the European Union.
Speech by the legitimate president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, delivered on 1 October 2022 in commemoration of the Catalan referendum of 1 October 2017
Dear compatriots,
On 1 October five years ago, Catalonia decided in a legal and binding referendum to become an independent state in the form of a republic. It did so despite the anti-democratic attack perpetrated by the Spanish state, because the playing field on which we managed to drag it is not its own. It is ours. It is that of democratic overflow, of citizen mobilisation, of disobedience to injustice; it is that of the fabulous combination of everyone, from the institutions to the millions of citizens passing through parties and organisations, to make possible what the Spanish regime told us was impossible.
The Spanish state could not and cannot compete with any of this. Let us always bear this in mind, because this is the formula for victory. This is the great weakness of a very powerful state, and this is precisely our great strength. And if we are to win, we need the permanent democratic overflow that began five years ago today.
Nothing, absolutely nothing that we did would have been possible without the active participation of millions of people; without the commitment of collectives that are still being repressed by the state today. The referendum bears your names and surnames; the ballots and the ballot boxes will always be yours if that is why, however many years go by, I will never cease to express the immense honour and gratitude I felt at being president of a country capable of doing this.
Today, however, we make no act of nostalgia. Let those who, both from Madrid and from our own home, ask us to let it go, abandon all hope. Who sing us the absolutes. Who tell us that it was useless, that it didn't work out, that we have to get over the mourning or that we have to turn over a new leaf. Or that we have to go another way. That it is too difficult and that the principle of reality advises us to eat little and digest well.
Today we warn all these deluded gravediggers that their mourning is dismissed. Ours is a struggle that does not expire, just as none of the just causes for which millions of people all over the world continue to fight, despite the fact that their founding moment has been behind them for years, expire. The struggle for civil rights does not end when the regime that oppresses them is broken; today many people in Europe are victims of racism and xenophobia despite the fact that we have the most advanced legislation in existence. No one would dare to tell them that the founding mandate, the mandate that arose when they stood up against injustice, has already expired because the goal of having a just society, without racism, without discrimination, has not yet been achieved. On the contrary, it is the existence of so much injustice that obliges and binds us.
Our founding moment was five years ago. We have already held a referendum, it is valid and we don't have to do it again. We have already voted. True, no one said that we had done enough with that, but rather that we were starting a cycle that we knew was fraught with uncertainties. No one promised that it would be easy, or that we were infallible. The whole narrative that seeks to infantilise the movement, that seeks to water down what was a resounding and perfectly planned and executed victory, is deeply unfair and self-serving. We knew, and today it is more important than ever to remember this, that after the referendum we had the right, we had the legitimacy to embark on the path to materialise the independence of Catalonia. And we knew, and it is also important to remember this today, that we had found the formula for victory. Anything that deviates from this formula and from this legitimacy weakens and distances us from the horizon.
It is clear that there are people who want the horizon to weaken and recede. In the Spanish state, all its structures are at work. They spy on us as autocracies do, they infiltrate pro-independence organisations with impudence, they conspire to fabricate evidence and court cases that incriminate or attack the reputation of pro-independence supporters, and they use all their lobbying capacity to make the European Union look the other way. For five years they have been constructing a narrative, which these days we see more virulently than ever, with which they hide from Spanish public opinion what their state did to the defenceless population of Catalonia. Because they cannot explain it even at home, because shame will always haunt them.
This is what we were counting on. What we have to ask today, what we all ask here today, is that we remain determined to strengthen and bring the horizon closer, despite the siren songs or the songs of defeat. That we keep our heads up, and that we prepare ourselves at home and collectively, in social networking groups, in civil organisations, in political parties and institutions, to pick up where we left off. Today we know better than we did five years ago what the state's response will be, and today we know better than ever that the state will not renounce violence, if extreme violence is necessary, to keep Catalonia at the margin of its will.
And we also know how to defeat them, because we have had the formula for victory for five years. We must use it, and above all we must have the will to use it. This is the purpose of the Council for the Republic. That is why today we are looking to the future rather than to the past. That is why the party on 11 September disproved all the oracles of surrender. And that is why every new entry in the council's register of citizens irritates them and makes them angry, because the idea that someone wants to leave this 'wonderful and exemplary' Spanish monarchy does not want to enter their heads.
The Council proposes for this second phase of the cycle that we opened five years ago, a shared vision of the future, a strategy that is the daughter of the strategy of victory, which we know will unsettle the Spanish state. We will not disrupt it no matter how well the autonomous government functions or how impeccable the autonomous laws passed by Parliament are. Everyone has their own job to do. While the autonomy is being governed, independence has to be completed and someone has to do it. And the attitude of those who ask us to warn them when we really go there is no good either. Someone has to prepare what "going for real" means, it will not be done by spontaneous generation or by letting time go by.
That someone is the Council. With all our material limitations, and above all all the aggressions of which we are victims. But with all the ambition and political legitimacy to do so. Today, if there is one table to which we must be chained and from which we should never leave, it is the table of dialogue between us, between the brothers of Esquerra, Junts per Catalunya, the CUP, Òmnium and the Assembly. Today's event brings together this will, and I would like to thank you all very much for being here, that despite the problems we know we have, today everyone is at this table.
A table where it is possible to push and to push back at the same time; that combines effectively and intelligently the different strengths that we have. We have all of you, despite all the people who say "although". You proved it at the last national party. This is a strength. We have the votes of the people, represented in the Parliament of Catalonia and the vast majority of the country's local councils. This is also a great strength. And we have international recognition of the violations of political rights, arbitrary arrests and political persecution committed by the Spanish state against the democratic movement for the independence of Catalonia. And this is a great weakness of the state that we must know how to exploit.
It is true that it is a powerful, big and strong state. But its foundations are rotten. A monarchy that comes from Francoism; a judicial system trapped in the loop of Francoism that is renewed generation after generation; a media system at the service of the police and political sewer; a university system that gives degrees to its politicians and benefactors; an extractive economic system that impoverishes the regions of Spain. And a Spain addicted to the money it extracts from Catalonia every year, and which refuses to go to rehabilitation.
We must be able to constitute ourselves in permanent democratic overflow, because these foundations will not resist our strength. Spain told me, through the mouth of its president, that we would not hold the referendum. Your constitutional court, politicised to the bone, threatened us if we did. We did it, but above all you did it. You did a democratic act of self-confidence, which is the best thing that can happen to a society. You were what democratic Europe strives to be: a conscious and active, peaceful and respectful people, who become democracy's first line of defence against all abuse and authoritarianism. You were a democratic outpouring.
The whole world saw it. Five years ago Europe saw millions of its citizens leave Spain, and thousands were violently assaulted by the police of one of its member states. It said nothing, and we now know that Spanish pressure prevented it. But it realised that there was a democratic overflow.
Let everyone be clear that the votes that allow the institutions to govern come from this overflow. And it is quite normal and understandable that we begin to address those who have the responsibility, so that they put themselves at the service of what we decided five years ago today. It is a challenge that the Council intends to take up, just in case someone gets lost, and once they have taken our votes, we no longer see them. If progress is not made in the direction set out in the legal, democratic and binding referendum, the Council has an obligation to lead the way. Because the truncheons that threaten democracy did not stop five years ago; there are new truncheons, less obvious but with the same purpose. Paper truncheons, political truncheons, judicial truncheons, which continue to attack us in order to prevent the completion of the independence process.
What should we do in the face of these truncheons? The same as we did five years ago. And who has to do it? The same people we were. We have to do it by combining what civil society demands of us: pressure and rebuilding. Let's rebuild to put better pressure; let's activate to deactivate them; let's get together to prevent them from dividing us; let's prepare ourselves so that we don't lose moments or opportunities.
If in our country the rain does not know how to rain, let the victories know how to win. We are not better than anyone else, nor superior to anything else. We are Catalans and we want to continue to be so, quite simply. We want to speak Catalan without asking permission or having to engage in linguistic militancy; we want to have the resources we generate to eradicate poverty and ensure the well-being of everyone; we want to have the tools to be an economically prosperous, competitive, advanced and socially just country. We want to live in a democracy, in a state where its head of state can be held accountable for his or her actions. And we demand respect and dignity for the fact that we are Catalans, just as all peoples deserve respect and dignity for the fact that they are a people. We know that we will never achieve all this within Spain. And if some are resigned, we are not. As we are not resigned, and as we are preparing not to resign ourselves, today we have to shout louder than ever, with all the voices, the discrepancies, the accents, and the origins of our people:
Long live free Catalonia!
Carles Puigdemont
(President of the Council for the Republic)