Live News From Spain As It Happens

observing said:
Saturday, September 23, 2017 @ 9:00 AM

The best way to make people determined to vote pro independence. A whiff of Franco and, more recently, a similarity to how Putin behaves towards Ukraine. Shame on the Spanish establishment.

rsanchezlamoso said:
Saturday, September 23, 2017 @ 3:22 PM

Not at all! This has nothing to do with the Scotish case, Cataluña is a region within Spain (Comunidad Autónoma), is not even a Province and it was never a independent country, it was a "Condado" from Zaragoza. The Spanish Constitution does not permit a region within a country to claim independence, for this reason the referendum will have to be done for all Spaniards (including the Catalans), to vote and decide. The Catalans and other regions in Spain agreed to this when the Constitution was signed. So the goverment is acting within the law, anybody that violates the law, has to pay the consequences. Actually, the goverment has been acting very lite and with a lot of patience. The Cataluña region way before the Spanish civil war, has been known for being a conflicting region, with pro-comunists, anarquists, and anti-monarchists.. we still have those around, precisely these are the ones making all the noise, and others following like lambs. It´s impossible to have a referendum in a region within Spain, and they know it, thery are just playing a dangerous game,.. BTW, these is not about the "Catalans", it is about the "independentistas" within Cataluña, which are not a majority group. They are lucky that this is happenning in Spain, becasue if this happened in the United States, it will be a different story, and we will be looking at a few human bodies floating in the Mississippi river...