Democracy defeated the coup

A year on, it is clear that the Catalan parliamentary coup d’état of 2017 has strengthened the Spanish political nation

It is just over a year since the attempt to overturn the constitution – by bypassing the Catalan parliament, stepping on the rights of the representatives of the majority of Catalans, and disregarding the will of all Spanish people to coexist in peace and freedom – was defeated. Undoubtedly this was the most delicate moment that Spanish democracy has passed through since the coup d’état in 1981.

It was not, as some still claim today, a peaceful democratic effort to consult Catalan citizens about their future, but an illegal referendum on self-determination. A referendum based on an express law passed in defiance of the Constitutional Court, with neither mandatory reports of the Counsel of Statutory Guarantees or participation by the opposition. A law disguised as a harmless civic celebration leading to the proclamation of the independence of Catalonia in the 48 hours following a vote held without guarantees or rules for a minimum turnout to consider the result valid and binding. A law by which the parliament, without having passed through the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice granted itself the right to self-determination. A law that postulated itself as unabolishable and “hierarchically superior to all others”, therefore putting itself above the Spanish constitution and the statute of autonomy of Catalonia.

The number of hours dedicated to discussing whether that event was a coup or not is surprising. This is a nominalist, dishonest discussion aimed at generating noise to mask and dilute the seriousness of what happened. It is clear that the secessionists attempted to carry out a coup against democracy, constitution, and coexistence. By doing so from the institutions of self-government using the regional government, the Catalan parliament, the administration, the regional police forces, and schools, and by trying to legalise their coup with a law (actually two laws), there is a distinction between Puigdemont and Junqueras together (on the one hand) and Tejero (on the other) in their means, but not in their ends (to subvert the constitution).

The parliamentary coup d’état (or non-violent self-coup) is nothing new. Many democracies have abolished themselves using parliamentary majorities or popular plebiscites. From the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela, the very existence of which perpetrates a coup d’état every day against the Bolivarian constitution itself, to the demise of the Weimar Republic, which did not require a gun-wielding Hitler to storm into the Reichstag, but instead granted all state powers to the Führer. Let us consider, then, the substance, which is the attempt to abolish the constitution and the statute of autonomy, rather than the technique by which the coup was executed.

https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_democracy_defeated_the_coup