Salvador Illa, Catalonia's Socialist Party candidate for the up-coming Catalonia regional elections
Credit: AFP
The former health minister from Spain’s governing socialist party is expected to pull off an unlikely victory against Catalan separatists in regional elections dominated by coronavirus.
Parachuted in last month as the lead candidate of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party, Salvador Illa hopes to profit from his high-profile handling of the coronavirus crisis to cool tensions with pro-independence parties vying to break away from central Spain.
His message that it is “time to turn the page after a lost decade” after more than 10 years of Catalan nationalist governments focusing on detaching from the rest of Spain.
Elections take place on Sunday.
Mr Illa’s handling of Spain’s Covid crisis has been criticised with at least 70,000 Spaniards having died in the pandemic, but the mild-mannered former schoolteacher has managed to strike an unusually moderate tone within the raucous noise of Spanish political debate.
Mr Illa, who is from Catalonia, was hoping to form a government with support from the Left-wing ERC pro-independence party, with whom Mr Sánchez’s Spanish government has previously agreed to negotiate a political solution for the impasse over the region’s status.
Facing the possibility of more years of Catalan nationalist rule, a group of academics last week announced what they called an anti-propaganda archive detailing hundreds of incidents in which they say individuals not in favour of independence are discriminated against, bullied and marginalised.
“Anyone working in a public institution in Catalonia is subjected to constant ideological pressure; there is real fear of speaking out and it’s a suffocating atmosphere,” said Carlos Conde, the chair of Academics Forum who currently teaches Spanish History at Northumbia University.
Salvador Illa
Credit: Salvador Illa
Tomas Macsotay, an Art History researcher at Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University, launched the archive after being shocked by incidents of violence and threats on campus against students who formed a pro-unionist organisation called S’ha Acabat, aimed at arguing against the independence process that led to an unlawful referendum and resulting police violence in 2017.
“It is unacceptable in a democracy; I’m sure this is not happening in any other European Union country,” Dr Macsotay told the online newspaper El Español.
The archive includes cases of parents facing harassment for demanding greater use of the Spanish language in schools and teaching staff at schools and universities whose careers allegedly suffer if they don’t toe the pro-independence line.
Earlier this month Barcelona’s Medical Association admitted that it had unfairly dismissed Àlex Ramos from his job after he claimed he had been the victim of harassment due to his activity as deputy leader of Catalan Civil Society, a platform that opposes separatism.
But independence supporters point to the suffering of their leaders, some who have fled into exile and nine who were sentenced to prison in 2019 for sedition and other offences related to the 2017 referendum, besides a host of activists and local politicians also facing trials for disobeying the Spanish state.
“No one can tell me they are being repressed by Catalonia when there are 3,000 people suffering reprisals from the Spanish state through its courts,” Raül Romeva, a member of the Catalan government that organised the 2017 referendum and now serving a 12-year jail sentence, told The Telegraph.
Mr Romeva and the other eight jailed politicians have been granted day release by Catalan authorities this year, but the Spanish prosecution service is expected to appeal against the move.
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