You can be pro-independence, but you can't be independent

The forthcoming Catalan elections called for December 21 by the Spanish government, will not in fact be autonomous, but a plebiscite. The last time there were plebiscitary elections was in September 2015. The outcome of the legitimate, democratic vote led to the establishment of the current Parliament and the Government that have both now been dissolved, with members of the bureau of the Parliament, including Speaker Carme Forcadell, along with President Puigdemont and all his ministers being charged with such egregious allegations as rebellion.

The Spanish government has taken recourse to the now infamous Article 155, and has gone way beyond its scope by removing the Catalan Government, dissolving the democratically elected Parliament, the seat of the representation of the Catalan people's sovereignty, and calling elections, the faculty of which is solely in the hands of the President of Catalonia, as elected by the Parliament.

Thus the Catalan people will have to decide whether to hear the call to vote, or to abstain from partaking. Members of the majority coalition have expressed the idea that this will be an opportunity to once again make patent the contradiction in Spain's stance on democracy, i.e. the government by the people, and the so-called "general interest of the State", i.e. the establishment and the political and economic powers that be. The fact is that it will be a plebiscite between the 155 Bloc, represented by the Spanish government's (very) right-wing Partido Popular with the opposition "socialist" PSOE and Ciudadanos right-of-centre Spanish nationalists on one hand, and the victims of the application of Article 155 on the other.

The former are those who have led the Catalan Government and Parliamentary majority to take such measures as they have just to give voice to the citizens of Catalonia in a referendum, while the Spanish reaction was to send in riot police to aggressively repress a totally peaceful democratic vote attacking citizens who showed no violence whatsoever. Such is the attitude of Spain's so called Constitutional Bloc, that which approved the application of Article 155 in the Spanish Senate authorising the dissolution of a democratically elected Parliament and the Government it had endorsed.

And what if the latter win? What if the resulting Parliament once again shows a pro-independence majority, as the latest poll by a clearly pro-Spanish nationalist digital newspaper, El Español, countenances? Not a problem for the Senate's deputy speaker, Pedro Sanz, who stated in also pro-Spanish nationalist La Razón that if an outlaw (sic) majority wins they will apply Article 155 once again.

You can be pro-independence in "democratic" Spain, but you cannot be independent!