Calls grow in Madrid to ban Catalan nationalist parties
By
Alejandro López
11 October 2018
Demands are growing inside the Spanish political establishment to ban the main Catalan nationalist parties—the Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT), the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the pseudo-left Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP). These calls to attack or outlaw parties that collectively receive millions of votes mark a major escalation in the drive of the Spanish and European bourgeoisie toward a police state.
A year has passed since the Catalan independence referendum last October and its violent repression by police, which left over 1,000 peaceful voters injured. Yet the underlying conflicts are as bitter as ever. The right-wing Popular Party (PP) and Citizens are demanding the outlawing of the CUP; a new electoral law making it harder for Catalan, Basque and Galician nationalist forces to get seats in parliament; and that Madrid impose an unelected regional government in Catalonia by again invoking Article 155 of Spain’s 1978 constitution.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposed the Catalan referendum, a vote called by pro-austerity, pro-European Union (EU) parties aiming to split the working class along national lines. But its principled opposition to Catalan bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism does not lessen its opposition to the moves by the Spanish bourgeoisie, backed by the EU, to build a police-state regime whose central target would be rising militancy and strikes in the working class.
The PP and Citizens are seizing upon various events as pretexts for a crackdown and relying on the reactionary policies of the minority Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) government of Pedro Sánchez, backed by the pseudo-left…