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Spanish Parliament to weigh Catalan autonomy
MADRID The Spanish Parliament agreed Thursday to consider a proposal by the region of Catalonia calling for greater autonomy from Madrid, intensifying an already heated debate over the rights of Spain's regions to govern themselves. With a vote of 197 to 146, the Parliament decided early Thursday morning to open negotiations over the proposal, a process that is expected to last months.

Although the vote was largely a formality, the hours of passionate speeches preceding it underscored the seriousness of the debate ahead. The proposed statute, passed overwhelming by the regional Parliament of Catalonia in September, contains several elements that politicians in Madrid say could conflict with the Spanish Constitution. "The distance separating the statute and constitutionality is so abysmal that negotiations are impossible," Mariano Rajoy, the president of the conservative opposition group in Parliament, the Popular Party, said before the vote. His party was the only one to vote no Thursday.

Rajoy and other conservatives have accused Zapatero of being soft on Catalan demands for more autonomy, saying his stance threatens to set the stage for the region's separation from Spain.

Zapatero, a Socialist, and his allies said that the vote Thursday should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Catalan proposal, but simply as an agreement to discuss it. "Why be afraid of a democratic debate?" he said.
As a Socialist, shouldn't that question answer itself?
Although he avoided getting into specifics, Zapatero suggested that the proposal contained some elements that conflicted with the Constitution and that it would need to be revised before gaining his full support. One of the most controversial elements is a clause that says Catalonia constitutes a nation within Spain. Conservative politicians say that the Constitution does not allow for any region to declare itself a nation.

During the debate leading up to Thursday's vote, Zapatero seemed to take the middle ground. "Catalonia has a national identity," he said. "That is compatible with the Constitution."

His majority in Parliament depends on the support of a party from Catalonia called Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, which supports virtual independence from Spain and which may abandon him if he takes a tough stand against the proposal. Zapatero would be able to continue governing without the party's support, but many of his major initiatives would probably stall unless he struck an alliance with another party.

Zapatero says he is not compromised by his relationship with the party, contending that it will not lead him to adopt positions that are not in accordance with the Spanish Constitution.
Not any more so, anyway.
Calls for greater autonomy for Catalonia, a region of about seven million people in Spain's northeastern corner, go back centuries.
Posted by: Steve White 2005-11-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=134272