Friday, February 01, 2019

Puigdemont plays Russian roulette

Nicolás de Pedro is a senior researcher at The Institute for Statecraft.


To date, the leaders of the 'procés' had avoided showing closeness or explicit alignment with the Kremlin.

Puigdemont has sent a nod to the Kremlin. And it has not been precisely subtle. In an interview with the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaia Pravda, the escaped former president not only announces some future close and friendly relations of the "independent Catalonia" with Russia, but even goes further and makes his own some of the mantras of the propaganda machine of the Kremlin, this newspaper being a good sample thereof. We do not know what Puigdemont tries exactly to achieve with this move, but it reflects some significant developments.

To date, the leaders of the procés had avoided showing closeness or explicit alignment with the Kremlin. The Catalan independence movement hoped to be supported and recognized by the main Western powers and achieve a chimerical automatic stay of the Catalan republic in the European Union. As a result, a rapprochement to the Kremlin could be counterproductive, if not directly toxic to these aspirations. But, since actual facts are not going in that direction, in his current flight forward Puigdemont seems not to rule out any option to achieve the desired internationalization of the procés.
 
Several of his statements during the interview seek, without doubt, to arouse the sympathy of Russian public opinion and the Kremlin itself. Thus, Puigdemont warns about the "absolute destruction of the moral authority of the EU"; asked about Crimea and Donbas (Ukraine), he states that "the people of the whole world must have the same rights of recognition of their will by the international community"; and about NATO, he says, we should "rethink its role more as an instrument to protect democracy and peace." That is, the former president of Catalonia joins the Kremlin's campaign to undermine the EU and European democratic systems, legitimizes Russia's covert military intervention in Ukraine and sows misguided doubts about the Atlantic Alliance; since there are no follow-up questions, we are left without knowing what he thinks NATO is doing now if it is not protecting democracy and peace.

The interview completely assumes the framework of analysis of the Catalan independence movement and, with the help of the interviewer, Puigdemont takes advantage t0 put on the table a few falsehoods. Thus, for example, he leads to believe that only 10% of Catalans oppose independence, taking as reference those who voted no on October 1. The "referendum", by the way, is not contextualized, and is the case with most of the Russian media, it is considered as valid. Hence, they never speak of "illegal referendum"; only of straightforward "referendum".

Similarly, Puigdemont describes as "misinformation" the Russian interference in the Catalan crisis and claims that a "report of experts from the British Parliament rejects that there has been any secret influence of Russia." However, the report in question is quite explicit when it states that "we have heard evidence showing the alleged Russian interference". Puigdemont resorts to a frequent trick of media such as RT or Sputnik: presenting one thing for another. Thus, he does not really refer to the "report published by the British Parliament", but to the communication sent by a sympathetic hacker of Wikileaks and that, funnily enough, is the only one of the 154 received by the Committee in charge of this investigation about misinformation and fake news in Europe that supports his argument.

The whole interview has a friendly tone and Puigdemont is presented as "the peaceful rebel of the Iberian Peninsula" who now lives in Brussels with the picturesque condition of "political emigrant". Maybe that's why one of the members of his team in Waterloo published a tweet that conveyed some euphoria for the appearance of Puigdemont in (according to him) "the most important newspaper in Russia". However, although the headline of the interview points to that future friendship with Moscow, the former Catalan president is presented as "the leader of the Catalan separatists", which introduces an extremely negative nuance in the Russian context, where someone can end up in jail for the mere fact of sharing on social networks something that remotely might suggest sympathy for a secessionist movement within the Russian Federation.

In the same way, although in the news bulletins and talk shows of the main Russian television channels (Rossiya 1, NTB, RT, Rossiya 24 or Piervy Kanal) all the narratives of the Catalan independence movement were enthusiastically assumed and disseminated, the local speakers remained deeply disappointed with the flight of Puigdemont, white of mockery and darts since then. In fact, if that same team that surrounds the former president had made a somewhat deeper and calmer analysis, it would have easily understood that the main effect of this interview would not be what they were looking for. These statements of Puigdemont and his figure serve fundamentally to reinforce the Russian domestic audience about the narrative of the Kremlin on an EU adrift, infested with conflicts, inequalities and poverty and on the verge of collapse. Hence, for example, the wide coverage that these weeks are dedicated to the phenomenon of yellow vests in France. In the eyes of these same media, something not very different from what happened in Catalonia in the fall of 2017, even though those in Waterloo have not heard about it.




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