Compare and contrast

Belgium is to Puigdemont what Spain is to González, writes columnist Mark Nayler

Mark Nayler

Malaga

Friday, 13 September 2024, 15:10

Comparing Edmundo González to Carles Puigdemont is an illuminating exercise. Commenting on the Venezuelan opposition leader's flight to Spain last weekend, Josep Borrell, a ... member of the PSOE and the EU's foreign secretary, said that no politician who operates in a democracy "should be forced to seek asylum in another country". The implication, of course, was that Venezuela is not a properly-functioning democracy - that González is on the run from a repressive state that has zero respect for political freedom or the rule of law.

That's precisely what Puigdemont and his fellow separatists say about Spain. Writing in the Guardian in 2019, the year that nine of his colleagues were sent to prison for organising an illegal independence referendum, the former Catalan president accused the Spanish government of having "unleashed a wave of repression". In other parts of the world, such as Scotland and Quebec, he said, independence referendums are "perfectly acceptable and praiseworthy" but in Spain they are treated as a "heinous crime". As a result, Belgium is to Puigdemont what Spain is to González.

Puigdemont has a point. Several of his colleagues spent almost four years in prison - either side of a trial that he described as a "huge mistake" - for arranging the 2017 vote; yet his predecessor Artur Mas, who also arranged an illegal independence referendum (in 2014), was fined and banned from public office.

The former Catalan president is not alone in being concerned about the state of Spanish democracy. The poll I wrote about last week revealed that a majority of Spaniards think that democracy in Spain is deteriorating to a greater extent than anywhere else in the world, citing corruption and inequality before the law as the biggest problems.

In several important respects, though, Spain's democracy is much healthier than Venezuela's. Elections aren't rigged; congress contains a colourful plurality of parties, the leaders of which are free to criticise each other's ideologies; and the press can say what it likes.

Puigdemont likes to play the victim, to claim that he is being punished for merely expressing his political beliefs. But he didn't just give a speech back in 2017. He staged a referendum that lacked state backing (unlike that held in Scotland in 2014), and which had been declared illegal, in advance, by the country's Constitutional Court. Subsequently, he made a unilateral declaration of independence.

González's 'crime', by contrast, was to question Nicolás Maduro's claim to have won the general election in July. Given the lack of evidence for Maduro's alleged victory, and the authoritarianism that has characterised his regime over the past decade, that is a brave and necessary thing to do.

Yes, the state from which Puigdemont has been on the run since 2017 has punished some of his colleagues excessively; but comparing Spain's democracy to Venezuela's should leave us in doubt about which of the two is in better shape.

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