Elisenda Paluzie: "To avoid the referendum not arriving until 2030 we have to mobilise now"

The president of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC), Elisenda Paluzie, has said in an interview with ARA that the goal is for the Catalonia Day demonstration is to become a turning point to reactivate the street mobilisations and vindicate the mandate of the 2017 Independence Referendum. "To avoid the referendum not arriving until 2030 we have to mobilise now," she stated, in reference to President Pere Aragonès's forecast that a second referendum would be held before this date. "We are not in an ideal situation, but we have to mobilise," she said after reiterating that they hope to mobilise around 100,000 people.

Paluzie said that the demobilisation is the result of the pandemic and recalled that in the last year and a half there have been no mass demonstrations in Europe. "For this reason we see it as a resumption of the mobilisations," she said, despite admitting that the lack of a unified roadmap is disillusioning pro-independence grassroots. "The message we want to give is that independence will be won by us and is aimed at the government and grassroots movement," she said. The ANC leader added that independence processes "are not easy and that they cannot be subordinated only to professional politics, partisanship and electioneering". "All pro-independence actors have to meet to draw up a united strategy," she concluded.

As for the dialogue table, the ANC leader pointed out that the State is interested in making it seem that the conflict is being redirected and added that it can "weaken" the independence movement. "At the moment, it seems a dialogue of the deaf because the Catalan government talks about amnesty and self-determination and the Spanish government does not." "The problem is what to do these two years in which we are giving dialogue a chance. If we do not prepare seriously, it will be a problem," she added. She has also refused to get the EU involved. "The EU does not want a referendum because it knows we can win it and we have to take that into account," she said. In the same vein, she said that the granting of pardons has been "an intelligent proposal by Pedro Sánchez to give the image that the conflict has been appeased".

On the statements of her predecessor, Carme Forcadell, who has said several times that in 2017 those against independence were ignored, Paluzie has refuted it and said that "political parties opposed to independence did not have democratic maturity" and stressed that "more was expected of En Comú and the Catalan Socialists, who did not try to win democratically at the polls".