Catalonia gets almost everything, except independence.
Catalan secessionists are extracting so many concessions from the Spanish government that soon there will be no need to strive for independence. Their latest victory came last month—a tentative agreement from Spain’s Socialist-led government to allow the wealthy northeastern region, also controlled by a Socialist administration, to collect its own personal income tax. Fiscal autonomy has always been one of the separatists’ key goals; if this deal becomes reality, they will be considerably closer to achieving it.
The new financing agreement shows the extent to which a small group of separatists now dominates Spanish politics. Both Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Catalonia’s Socialist president, Salvador Illa, were elevated to office with support from two pro-independence Catalan parties, the leftist ERC and center-right Junts per Catalunya. The new taxation model was one of the conditions demanded by the ERC in exchange for supporting Illa’s investiture last year. Sánchez has also paid a high price for separatist support, on which his minority coalition depends to pass legislation. But for the Catalans, these victories are merely steps toward their ultimate goal, which has so far proved elusive: a binding independence referendum.
There were mixed reactions to the new finance model. Catalonia’s minister of the presidency, Albert Damau, hailed it as a “paradigm shift… aimed at improving public services in our country.” Spain’s minister for territorial integrity, Ángel Torres, said it was designed to “take into account the distinct features of each region”; oddly, he also said it catered to the “unique characteristics and needs of Catalonia.” The financing arrangement, it seems, is both bespoke and widely applicable—which makes one wonder whether it has any real substance. “We don’t buy it,” said a Conservative minister: “This is an attempt to conceal what they’re really trying to agree on” (he didn’t elaborate). Junts claimed that the new arrangement merely increases Catalonia’s administrative duties. “There is no new financing model, neither singular nor plural,” claimed the party.
It is unlikely that this proposed tax model would be approved by a parliamentary vote. Despite Torres’s claims of universality, it is clearly tailored to appease Catalonia and keep Sánchez and Illa in power. As part of the deal by which he was returned to office in 2023, Sánchez also campaigned for Catalan to be accepted as an official EU language, along with Galician and Basque (token add-ons, to disguise Catalonia’s preferential treatment). That request was rejected by Brussels in May—ostensibly for practical reasons, but one couldn’t help suspecting that the real motives were political. An estimated 10 million people speak Catalan in Spain, France, Andorra, and Sardinia, compared to the 1.9 million people who speak Irish, which was made the EU’s 24th official language in 2005. If the cost of translating every single EU document into a language classified by UNESCO as “definitely endangered” was justified, why wouldn’t it be for Catalan?
Catalan separatists scored their biggest victory against the Spanish state in November 2023, after an inconclusive election left Sánchez dependent on smaller parties to govern. In exchange for reinstating him, the ERC and Junts secured amnesties for all those punished for organizing the illegal referendum of October 2017, in which 92% voted for independence (although turnout was only about 43%). In 2019, thirteen leading secessionists—including the ERC’s leader, Oriol Junqueras—were sentenced to between nine and thirteen years in prison by Spain’s Supreme Court, at the end of what Sánchez described as “an exemplary legal process.” He promised to “fully comply” with the court’s decision, adding that “no one is above the law.” Announcing their pardons four years later, Sánchez said that he hoped to foster “dialogue, understanding, and forgiveness”—as if his U-turn on Catalan independence was owed to principle, not expediency. He could afford to be a unionist back in 2019, but not anymore.
What Catalonia’s separatists really want is a state-approved referendum modeled on Scotland’s in 2014. This was made possible by the so-called Edinburgh Agreement of 2012, in which the UK’s Conservative prime minister David Cameron and Scottish first minister Alex Salmond solidified the referendum’s legal basis and agreed to respect its outcome (Scots chose to remain as part of Britain by 55% to 45%). But that, in turn, depended on the UK’s loose constitutional structure. Spain, like the US, has a single, written document, so a Spanish version of the Edinburgh Agreement would almost certainly require prior Constitutional reform. Even then, independence would not be guaranteed: recent polls show that support for secession has hit a historic low of 40% in Catalonia, with 53% of Catalans opposing it.
After signing the Edinburgh Agreement, Salmond and Cameron received an emotional letter of congratulation from Catalonia’s then pro-independence president, Artur Mas, who said that his movement also believed “in the right to decide and in the normality of a democratic process in which a people that feels itself to be a nation may discuss and choose… which road it will take towards the future.”
Unlike Salmond, Mas didn’t wait for state approval. In 2014, the same year as the Scottish vote, he held his own referendum—hastily re-branded as a “citizen participation process” after Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled it illegal—in which 80% of the 2.2 million participants voted to split from Spain. For this transgression, Mas received much lighter punishment than his successors would—a €36,500 fine and a two-year ban from public office. The disparity suggests that the orchestrators of the 2017 vote faced a judiciary that was determined to punish them—not as individuals, but as symbols of a movement that the Spanish state had failed to shut down three years earlier.
Despite having a supine central government at their mercy, Catalan separatists are no closer to a legal referendum than they were a decade ago. But unlike their Caledonian counterparts, perhaps they don’t need one. Aided by a prime minister who’s utterly dependent on them, they are steadily increasing Catalonia’s autonomy and influence within Spain. There might not be much chance of a Spanish version of the Edinburgh Agreement, but Sánchez is giving them everything else they want.
