CATALONIA - From business-as-usual to political upheaval, Mas is Catalonia's unlikely independence leader | Fox News
#presidentMas "If the Spanish government don't let us vote, the relationship between Catalonia and Spain will become even more frayed"
BARCELONA, Spain – Artur Mas doesn't
seem like a political revolutionary. He wears sober, expensive suits and
has shunned fiery speeches during his three-decade career as a
risk-averse, pro-business civil servant.
Yet Mas is
the architect of a daring attempt to carve out a new European country by
achieving independence for Catalonia, a wealthy region of northeastern
Spain, including the city of Barcelona, that is fiercely proud of its
language and distinct cultural traditions.
If
Catalonia's regional president wins backing in a planned Nov. 9 local
referendum on whether to secede, his success will not only fuel the
independence cause in the nearby Basque country, it will also encourage
other separatist-minded regions across the continent, such as Belgium's
Dutch speakers. In Britain, Scotland will vote on its own proposal for
independence in September.
Mas says his path was set
in June 2010, just months before he took power, when the Spanish
constitutional court struck down key parts of a groundbreaking law that
would have granted Catalonia more autonomy and would have recognized it
as a nation within Spain. That legal setback after decades of political
struggle only made Catalans more determined to distance themselves from
the national government in Madrid, Mas said.
"There
was a change of mindset," he told The Associated Press in an interview.
"Many people in Catalonia said, 'if we continue in the same way as the
last 30 years we won't get anything, we will go backward instead of
forward.' Four years have passed and the movement has kept growing."
In
2012, more than 1 million Catalans demanding an independence ballot
took to Barcelona's streets in the largest nationalist rally since the
1970s.
The Spanish government says it won't let
Catalonia break away. Parliament in April overwhelmingly rejected
Catalonia's petition to hold the referendum, and the government says the
independence vote is impossible under the Constitution. If Mas goes
ahead with the ballot, as he says he will, the government can go to
court to stop it. But Mas' message to Spanish Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy is that the vote will help ease political tensions.
"If
the Spanish government and institutions don't let us vote, the
relationship between Catalonia and Spain will become even more frayed,"
Mas said.
With unofficial talks with the Madrid
government going nowhere, Mas said he hoped Spain's new monarch, Felipe
VI, who will be proclaimed king on Thursday, will help mediate the
conflict.
"A new head of state, a new king of Spain,
is always a new scenario," said Mas. "I hope I will have the
opportunity to be in touch and talk to (him) and try to convince him."
Polls
show that while a strong majority of Catalonia's 7.5 million residents
want to hold the ballot as an expression of self-determination, only
around half of them are in favor of severing ties.
Mas
believes a win for the "yes" vote in Scotland on Sept. 18 could boost
Catalonia's independence bid. "If in Scotland the 'yes' vote wins then
the main advantage for Catalonia will be that the negotiation between
Scotland and the United Kingdom and the European Union will give us a
very direct sign" on how a new European state could fit into the EU, Mas
said.
The 58-year-old Mas was born into Barcelona's
industrial bourgeoisie. Like others of his generation, he was
prohibited from studying in the Catalan language — which is spoken in
tandem with Spanish in the bilingual region — during General Francisco
Franco's 1939-1975 dictatorship.
Mas said that when
he was young his family, like many in the region, was comfortable with a
dual identity of feeling both Catalan and Spanish, but they "changed
their mentality and they became more Catalan than Spanish, and with the
passage of time only Catalan."
Fluent in French and
English, Mas insists one of his goals is to earn wider international
recognition for the political situation of a region best known for its
Barcelona football team, the flamboyant creations of Salvador Dali and
Antoni Gaudi, and as a leading tourism destination.
If
the courts block the November vote, Mas may be forced to put his job on
the line and call early regional elections. That could endanger his
leadership role in the movement, with many pro-independence voters
ignoring his party in favor of another, that has a more extreme and
longer-standing pledge to break centuries-old ties with the rest of
Spain.
"He put all his eggs in the basket of the
political process," said Ferran Requejo, professor of political science
at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University. "There is no question, if the
process fails, Mas fails with it."
