Cacerolada

Click on the audio link above. If you think it sounds like a whole lot of pots and pans being banged together, you’d be right. I took it from my balcony on Tuesday night but you would have heard something pretty similar if you stepped out onto just about any balcony in Barcelona between 10 and 10:15 every night this week after that (this page is in Spanish but the video has some good scenes of the pot-banging).

It’s called a Cacerolada or Cacerolazo (cacerola is the Spanish word for a cooking pan). It’s a form of public protest very popular in much of the Spanish-speaking world – and has even reached a few other places, like Canada.

The residents of Barcelona were banging their pots and pans together in protest to the latest set-back in their fight for a referendum on independence from Spain. Here’s a post I wrote about the Catalan push for independence the other week.

A makeshift bilboard for the Sí Sí (Yes, Yes) camp

Since I wrote that post, the central government took the referendum to the Constitutional Court, which duly froze it.  In an attempt to keep his word but not break the law, the Catalan Premier, Artur Mas, called a “proceso participatorio” (participatory process) - a sort of unofficial referendum – in which the very same questions would be asked, on the very same day (today, November 9) but with a non-binding result and without the same Catalan government involvement that an official referendum would entail.

That didn’t satisfy anyone. The independistas felt betrayed as they were not getting the true referendum they were promised. The “unionists” thought it was even worse than the referendum as it would lack the democratic guarantees of an official vote.  The Catalans who want the derecho de decidir (right to vote) but who were planning to vote to stay with Spain saw the compromise as a farce in which the only people who would bother voting would be the independistas. And the central government argued that any vote would be illegal and took this one to the Constitutional Court too, which froze it on Tuesday.

And hence all the pot-banging this week.

I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a tactical error on the part of the central government to go back to the Constitutional Court as it has, at least temporarily, shifted the anger away from Artur Mas straight back onto them.

The independistas and others in favour of the derecho de decidir might not have been happy with the Premier’s compromise, but they are even more unhappy, or better said angry, firstly with the Spanish government for going back to the Constitutional Court and secondly with the Constitutional Court itself for, in their minds, trying to rob them of their democratic right to have their say.

The referendum countdown clock, as it looked today, the day of the vote

And in the end, the vote has gone ahead anyway (the first vote actually being cast in a Catalan polling place in Australia!). It’s looking like the turnout has been big too - more than two million of the six million people who could have voted. Not bad for an unofficial referendum in a county where voting is not compulsory. 

The result is pretty much not in doubt: a win for the first part of the question at least: “Do you want Cataluña to be it’s own State?” And probably for the second part of the question too: “Do you want that State to be independent?”

The ballot paper

As the result is not binding, even if that prediction proves true, I won’t be needing a visa to live here any time soon. But now that the question has been asked, what comes next is going to be very interesting. All eyes are on both the central and Catalan governments to see their next moves.

A final word on caceroladas.  I took part in one once. We were demonstrating in Madrid’s Plaza Chueca, the traditional heart of gay Madrid, against moves by the Town Hall to limit the city’s famous Gay Pride celebrations.

I’ve got to say it was a lot of fun and it is quite an effective manner to protest in the sense that it does get you noticed - a relentless banging on hundreds of pots and pans simply can't be ignored.  It wasn’t so successful in stopping the limitations though and these days Madrid’s Pride is sadly a shadow of its former self. But that's another story for another post.