09.04.2014 - 08:41
The President of the Spanish Government addressed the Spanish Congress on Tuesday to explain why his party will vote against the Catalan Parliament’s petition to be delegated powers to hold a referendum. Although press reports had suggested he might make the Catalans an offer, he stayed mostly to the course he has followed so far, rejecting the sovereignty of the Catalan people, and refusing that the Spanish Constitution allows a referendum.
Rajoy began his speech by expressing his love for Catalonia, and his belief that he knows Catalonia better than the Catalan representatives themselves. “I don’t have to keep talking about, I know it exists,” he said.
But he quickly returned to the question at hand, whether the Spanish Congress would grant the Catalan Parliament the power to hold a referendum, and said that the Constitution did not give him the power to do so. “You are not right. You can’t open doors that don’t exist.” He also called the Spanish Constitution the “true self-determination of the Catalan people”.
The Spanish president dismissed the massive mobilizations in favor of independence, telling the Catalan representatives that it “was useless to wrap yourselves in popular demonstrations” because “some impossible things don’t change even with demonstrations or plebiscites”. “It’s not about a question of political will, or flexibility, or finding common ground … Mas and I can’t solve this over a cup of coffeee, because we don’t have the power that the Constitution denies us.”
In his rebuttal to the comments of the three Catalan delegates, he made a reference to one of them mentioning “wandering in space”. (This was Marta Rovira, who was actually quoting Rajoy’s own Foreign Affairs Minister, José Manuael García-Margallo, who said in early March that a unilateral declaration of independence “would condemn Catalonia to wander aimlessly through space without international recognition”.) Rajoy said he hadn’t heard the expression, and that he thought an independent Catalonia would most resemble the island of Robinson Crusoe.
