[ARABNEWS] Insanity was once defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In the current period of European political madness, early elections and referendums are being repeatedly used in futile attempts to resolve political crises, as a substitute for vision and leadership. In most cases the results do nothing but highlight the deep divisions, mainly because the root causes of the issues at hand have not been adequately dealt with.Last Thursday’s elections in Catalonia demonstrated exactly this. Catalan nationalism, whether one likes it or not, was not going to disappear just because the people of the region were asked to vote in an election for their regional Parliament. Rather than strategy, the move smacked of desperation by the central Spanish government and its Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The elections only further demonstrated that Catalans are divided over the issue of separating from Spain. The results cannot be called a decisive victory for the separatist parties, who won 70 of the 135 seats, although they still maintain a majority in the Catalan Parliament. Rajoy, on the other hand, is clearly the big loser. He gambled on voters to do the job for him of killing off the nationalist challenge, and lost. Those parties who do not want to break away from Spain are in a minority in the Catalan Parliament, and Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party recorded its worst ever result; it was all but wiped out, losing 8 of its 11 seats.
These results also highlight that Rajoy’s ill-judged decisions to impose direct rule after the Catalan Parliament declared independence, to go after the members of the Catalan government who supported the region’s independence, and then to call an election, have all backfired. Accusing Catalan President Carles Puigdemont of sedition and rebellion and jailing other members of the deposed Catalan government for similar offenses, was an overreaction made in panic. Turning Puigdemont, a rather lackluster leader, into an almost Che Guevara-style rebel with a European arrest warrant on his head, was only ever going to entrench nationalist resistance to Madrid. Though the arrest warrant was withdrawn last month, the damage had already been done. And now the regional election results have left Spain and Catalonia on the verge of further confrontation, and an out-of-sorts EU facing a major crisis brewing within its borders.