Barcelona (AFP)
"It's over your head." In Catalonia, opponents of independence express their fed up with the new outbreak of fever that has shaken the region since the condemnation Monday separatist leaders.
Demonstrations against 9 to 13 years in prison on Monday sentenced to nine separatists for their role in the 2017 secession attempt degenerated into violent clashes between hundreds of youth and police on Tuesday and Wednesday night.
Barcelona, capital of the region and second city of the country, has notably experienced scenes of urban guerrilla warfare and fires of barricades and cars.
A situation that has further widened the gap separating supporters of the independence and unity of Spain, especially in universities where a strike was called Thursday and Friday.
Julia Moreno, president of the student association "S'ha acabat" (C'est fini), opposed to separatism, assures AFP that since Monday, even before the strike, many students miss classes to protest against the judicial sentence but also by "fear or because of intimidation".
The atmosphere is "tense" in lecture halls, according to this student of law and political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, accusing pro-independence students of wanting to "impose their ideology on all others".
On the Place de Catalogne, a road and bridge engineer, Daniel Ribé, calls himself "total anti-independence".
"It seems to me an absurdity that they have arrived at this situation, it should have been stopped before," said the 66-year-old, for whom the process that led to the proclamation of an ephemeral Catalan republic on October 27, 2017 is "a coup".
"How can we let them say, now, that a judicial sentence is an attack on democracy?", He adds, assuring that he has not voted for years.
- "Impose their ideology" -
On the night of Wednesday to Thursday, a 38-year-old Spaniard, Pablo Pujante, an insurance expert, was trying to remove from the middle of the street the containers that three young people had just placed to burn them.
"I live here in this street," he told them, very up, "and what you're doing nowhere." The separatists, you're fooling yourself on the road. form, breaking the law, do it in peace. "
The protesters "are daddy's children who misuse freedom because they have never missed it," asserts Antonio LLovera, 57, who was born in the time of Franco's dictatorship, who went to the streets to see damage.
"We are over the head of this process (independence) They have robbed us ten years of coexistence and we wish to open a new stage of serenity", says for its part Fernando Sánchez Costa, president of Sociedad Civil Catalana (SCC ), a platform defending the unity of Spain.
This association has called a demonstration on October 27 in Barcelona, on the occasion of the two years of the failure of the declaration of independence of the Catalan Parliament in 2017.
- "Emotional Factor" -
One figure illustrates the division of Catalan society on the issue of independence: according to a poll published in July by the Catalan independence government, 44% of Catalans support secession while 48.3% oppose it.
Despite this advantage, anti-independence activists accuse the regional government of ignoring them. According to the vice president of SCC, Alex Ramos, it is now time "to devote the energy, day by day, health, education", not the separatist project in which persists the regional government independence.
For Astrid Barrio, a political scientist at the University of Valencia, the condemnation on Monday of the separatist leaders has opened a little more the gap between the two camps.
"When this emotional factor is activated, the distance becomes huge and it does not seem that it will calm down in the coming days," said the analyst, who advocates the consensus in Catalonia to avoid a "permanent draw between powerlessness".
© 2019 AFP