Rain, rain

Who’ll stop the rain?

The Spanish Constitutional Court perhaps.

The Court meets in about an hour to discuss this coming Sunday’s non-binding volunteer-staffed Catalan consulta on independence, and the nub of their discussion will be about the stopping of it. A couple of days ago I said, perhaps in a moment of euphoria, that the Consulta seemed “unstoppable”.

Today that begins to be put to the test. The Court will predictably back the Madrid Government’s quest to get the Consulta suspended. Then the ball will be back in the Catalan court. How will the Catalan government respond?

The “unstoppability” I mentioned is due to the fact that the mechanisms are all in place, the momentum is there, volunteers ready to go, polling places prepared and advertised, voting papers copied as PDF files on just about every pro-independence computer in Catalonia. Etcetera. So even if the Catalan government were to call it off (which they won’t, in any direct sense), Catalans will put votes into ballot boxes on Sunday, I am sure. 

My guess is that the Catalan government will respond with another counter legal move, and yet the Constitutional Court will probably anticipate that as well in its ruling.

It is becoming like one of those close basketball games, where the key is who’s going to have possession in the last few seconds. And of course, bearing in mind that this “match” is not even the final. In the pro-independence roadmap the Consulta is in theory only the penultimate step to the definitive indepedence vote, while from the Spanish government perspective their Catalan battle takes place in a generalised context of crisis due to the absolutely scandalous level of political corruption that has come to light in the last two weeks and the nosedive of the governing PP in the opinion polls.