BREAKING: Catalonia Declares Independence

[Tintrlvr]

Today the police arrested a dozen of high officials of the Catalan government, apparently the main organizers of the referendum. Also the police has been raiding printing companies and confiscated the ballots they found there. It's hard to see how the referendum could take place normally after all that.

Whoever is "right" on that question, Spanish democracy looks quite bad, when you compare fpr example with the UK and how it handled referedums on Scotland and the EU...

The way the Spanish central government has reacted to this is frankly pathetic. Catalan independence never would have gone anywhere if they didn't insist on alternatively goading and repressing the nationalists at every turn.

[Tintrlvr]

Official provisional results of the referendum:

Yes 2,020,144(90 %)
No 176,566(7,8 %)
Turnout: 2,262,464 (using the 2015 regional election as a benchmark, 41% turnout)

Some votes still to be counted, like 50 000 or so.

That's pretty low turnout, if I'm not wrong.  Wasn't it projected to be higher?

Around 700,000 ballots were seized by the Spanish government and not counted. Also, most anti-independence voters did not vote, and probably the violence by the police scared some pro-independence voters off from voting, too. It seems extremely likely that independence would have won without the boycott and Spanish government intervention, given the results and assuming a healthy turnout of more like 80% (similar to the Scottish referendum).

[Tintrlvr]

Out of curiosity, is there any interest whatsoever in French Catalonia in joining Spanish Catalonia in independence? I assume the answer is no but have not really seen anything on it one way or another. I think Catalan is less spoken in Perpignan etc. than in Spanish Catalonia in any case, so it's more like Valencia than like Spanish Catalonia.

[Tintrlvr]

They should solve this old school and force Rajoy and Puigdemont to get married.

Strongly approve.