Although the massive independence demonstrations of the Diada began in 2012 with Artur Mas as president of the Generalitat, the first leader who held the position attended the event was Carles Puigdemont, in 2016, the first year of his mandate. Since then, only Quim Torra stopped going to the protest called by the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and Òmnium Cultural in 2020 in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Artur Mas in his institutional message on the occasion of the Onze of September 2012 said that his “heart, spirit and commitment” would be with the protesters – to the point that it was his wife Helena Rakosnik – but he decided not to attend the march considering that he should preserve the institutional nature of the position. In a few days he would visit Mariano Rajoy in Moncloa to ask him for a fiscal pact for Catalonia with very little expectation of success, as the facts ended up confirming.
Since then, Mas maintained the same criteria in the successive demonstrations of the ANC and Òmnium Cultural, but he always received their organizers in Palau. There could have been an exception in 2015, on the eve of the “plebiscitary” elections of 27-S. But it was even proposed that he attend as a candidate, not as president, and the uncertainty remained until the last minute. Finally, the criterion of preserving the position above the condition of candidate was imposed and it was not.
Precisely those elections were the ones that allowed Mas to attend the 2016 demonstration, once stripped of his status as president. JuntsxSi, an unprecedented coalition between Convergència and ERC among other actors to confront 27-S, did not obtain an absolute majority and came to depend on the CUP, which rejected the investiture of Mas, who ended up yielding in favor of Carles Puigdemont, until then a convergent outsider and mayor of Girona.
Artur Mas manifested himself in Barcelona as president of the PDC, heir party to Convergència, while Puigdemont did so in Salt (Girona) in a decentralized act that was also held in Lleida, Tarragona and Berga. The new president took advantage of the day to announce that he would make a final referendum offer to the Spanish government.
And the referendum came the following year, but without an agreement with the government of Mariano Rajoy. On the eve of 1-O and a few days after the stormy sessions of Parliament on September 6 and 7 in which the so-called disconnection laws were approved, Puigdemont repeated as president in the Diada demonstration that served to give legitimacy popular to the consultation that was approaching. Puigdemont warned Rajoy that only a political negotiation could stop it.
Puigdemont could not repeat because after the declaration of independence and the application of 155 at the end of October, he went to Belgium, along with other ministers, to avoid the action of the Spanish justice that ended up imprisoning others. But Quim Torra did attend, who acceded to the presidency of the Generalitat at the last breath -the CUP prevented the investiture of Jordi Turull when he was going to be imprisoned by Pablo Llarena-.
The march was once again a great success and the imprisoned leaders acted as glue for a movement that was beginning to show some signs of division. “We needed courage and we already have it,” admitted the then president, who the day before had encouraged citizens to attend and had called for citizen resistance to the judicial processes for 1-O. With the main independence leaders in jail or expatriates, the illusion of other years mutated into a mixture of indignation and sadness. Pedro Sánchez was already in Moncloa.
And in a pre-electoral climate in Spain, the seventh great pro-independence demonstration of the Diada took place in 2019, to which Torra returned, with the pro-independence movement and a month after the ruling of the Supreme Court for 1-O, with a harsh sentence. independence leaders, which sparked violent protests. The demonstration of the Onze de Setembre, with the slogan “Objectiu independència” brought together 600,000 people, who asked for the freedom of the prisoners and the unity of the parties. At the end of the day, the CDR staged disturbances in front of the Parlament.
And in those that the covid pandemic arrived that changed everything, in particular because of the restrictions it imposed. The ANC prepared a limited protest while respecting safety distances and Torra, who had become a champion of the fight against the pandemic and of the toughest measures, declined to attend. The independence leaders had already been sentenced to long prison sentences for sedition, the division between the independence parties was already more than evident and Torra spent his last days as president waiting for the Supreme Court’s confirmation of his disqualification that would arrive on the eve of the third anniversary from 1-O.
And in the midst of the pandemic and in almost dystopian conditions, the elections that sealed Pere Aragonès’ access to the Palau de la Generalitat were held in February 2021. With the convicted leaders already pardoned and on the eve of the meeting of the dialogue table between the Spanish and Catalan governments, Aragonès went to his first big demonstration, where he was received with some boos for his commitment to dialogue, not supported by JuntsxCat, their partners in the government. The then president of the ANC, Elisenda Paluzie, also made his strategy ugly and, emulating Carme Forcadell, snapped at him: “President make independence.”
This year Aragonès does not want to go through the same thing, and after interpreting that the demonstration is against the parties and not against the Spanish State, he has declined to attend. The Assembly has already made it clear that “the victory of 1-O and the pro-independence majority in Parliament cannot be wasted in dialogue tables with the Spanish State and internal brawls.”
