Patriots in Spain are taking to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, in a show of massive defiance against what many are calling nothing short of a socialist coup. We are going to see what is happening in cities all throughout the nation, what led to it, and how it foreshadows the kind of clashes we can expect to see around the world in the not-so-distant future.
It’s going down in Madrid tonight as police take on nationalist protesters fed up of the country’s descent into socialism. pic.twitter.com/NoYsGnU9DN
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 10, 2023
– Protests erupt in over 50 cities in Spain as citizens demand the resignation of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez for forming a controversial coalition with Catalonian separatists to stay in power.
– Spaniards, dissatisfied with Sanchez’s political maneuvering, are calling for snap elections, accusing him of prioritizing personal power over national unity.
– The unrest reflects a larger global trend of reterritorialization, with regions reclaiming political power, either through renewed nationalist sentiments or separatist movements, challenging the centralized structures of globalism.
Hundreds of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in over 50 cities throughout the nation of Spain. For nearly the last 2 weeks, demonstrators have daily flooded the streets to demand the resignation of the socialist leftwing prime minister Pedro Sanchez who’s currently trying to make a deal with Catalonian separatists in order for him to stay in power.
Several weeks ago, Spaniards went to the polls and voted out their Socialist government led by Sanchez, and voted instead for the center right Popular Party, who won the most votes. The problem is that they didn’t win an outright majority, and the nationalist populist party known as Vox, which has skyrocketed to the third most popular party in the nation, didn’t do well in the national elections. so the votes fell short for the Popular Party to form a governing coalition.
In an attempt to hold on to power, Sanchez the socialist is making a very controversial move. He is forming a coalition with a small party in favor of Catalonian secession from Spain. The party is called Together for Catalunya. They are a group that helped orchestrate what the Spanish government considers an illegal referendum for Catalonian independence a few years back, which passed by a whopping 90% approval. Madrid responded swiftly and declared the referendum illegal. They cracked down on dissent with almost Tiananmen Square-like force, which, interestingly enough, the European Union completely ignored. Regardless, Madrid imposed on Catalonia what’s called Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution. This ruled the entire Catalan government null and void with each member of Parliament removed from office and the leader of the separatist movement actually leaving Catalonia for Brussels in a self-imposed exile in order to avoid arrest by Spanish authorities. Catalonians held new elections, and they overwhelmingly voted back into office the three separatist parties that had sponsored the referendum in the first place.
Their socialist prime minister Sanchez, who was basically just voted out of office, is agreeing to an amnesty deal with these Catalan separatists which would in effect grant forgiveness to the Catalan leader who is in exile as well as thousands of other Catalan separatists, which many believe is only setting the stage for another successful independence referendum.
Sanchez is being accused of splitting Spain apart just to keep power. This isn’t sitting well with the nationalist populist, the Spain-first party, known as Vox. Vox has risen to extraordinary prominence over the last few years. They have been winning provincial elections throughout the nation, and they were poised to crush it in the last national election. It didn’t happen, and they didn’t get the vote share they were hoping for. Now with Sanchez coming across as treasonous and selling out the unity of the nation for his own political power, the Spanish people are rising up like never before.
Tens of thousands are taking to the streets in 53 different Spanish cities and calling on Sanchez to resign. They are calling for snap elections in view of what this Socialist party is attempting to do here. Santiago Abascal, leader of the Vox party, is calling the amnesty deal nothing less than a coup. He is calling on all Spaniards to rise up against the Socialists. And they are. Over the course of the last two weeks, reports are that hundreds of thousands have gathered in cities like Madrid and tens of thousands in Seville, Valencia, and Granada. It appears as if there is going to be no end to this until there are new elections, with Vox positioning itself to do much better this second go around.
What’s happening here in Spain is a perfect example of the new kind of politics that is dominating the 21st century. Reterritorialization informs us of what we are seeing here. Regions are being reclaimed. Reterritorialization is the opposite dynamic of globalism, which by its nature deterritorializes. Globalization is a transnational one-size-fits-all political and economic system, so globalism by its nature disembeds and dislocates political power and decision making away from localized control, away from communities and districts and counties. It recalibrates and centralizes that political power and decision making into the hands of the very few like the European Union.
Scholars are in wide agreement that the centralized globalist world is beginning to break up. More populations are reterritorializing their political power and taking their political power back from the hands of a centralized political elite. Not everyone is reterritorializing in the same way. In an increasingly post-globalist world, re-territorialization is being worked out in a number of ways, and two prominent ways it’s working out is through renewed nationalist sentiments and renewed separatist secessionist sentiments.
The new nationalisms would be like Trump’s MAGA movement or Viktor Orban’s Hungary. They involve a renewed sense of national sovereignty. This restoration is of the nation-state against the anti-nationalist forces of liberal globalism. This is what is animating the Vox Party in Spain. There is another outworking of this reterritorialization called neo-secessionism in the form of smaller Independence movements.
Populations are increasingly wanting to break away from the nation-state and form their own independent republics organized around a common region, race, or religion. We are seeing this all over including Lithuania, Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, Barundi, Quebec, South Sudan, Slovenia, Scotland, and now, most especially, in Catalonia. What is happening here in Spain is that two different outworkings of the same political dynamic, reterritorialization, are clashing with one another. These are the kinds of conflicts that we can expect to see more of as the world is going through this major recalibration and reconfiguration away from globalism.
Copyright, 2023. TurleyTalks.com
