It’s all about ballot boxes

It’s all about ballot boxes and we’ll have to go back to the polls. Ballot boxes have always been the objective of the pro-independence camp, even when thousands of people were defending them on October 1 in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

We’ll have to go back to the polls to send a crystal clear message that allows us to bring stability back to Catalonia and regain our institutions by listening to the voice of all the people. At some point we will need to analyse how we lost our home rule and we gained a symbolic declaration that was not magical, as few dared to say in public.

As things stand today, the vote called by Madrid is an opportunity. In the meantime, we will continue to live through dark times. Spain’s judicial machine is on, implacable and humiliating. Two pacifists will remain in jail charged with sedition and the entire Catalan government has been summoned to answer to charges of rebellion, even though the only violence that we have seen has come from Spain and the far right.

Part of the government is in Brussels while the rest holds meetings outside the Catalan administration, where no official business is conducted, to the impotence of many public employees who have loyally stood by the Generalitat for four decades.

After years of conscientious, civic-minded rallying, the general public are entitled to some good sense and transparency. There is zero trust in the State, but we also need to rebuild confidence at home to continue supporting a long-term project for a better country, without improvisation and with dignity, at a time as dramatic as the one we are going through.