You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m talking about Quebec, where we have occasional referendums on sovereignty and (so far) have rejected it — often by a very close margin.

But … no! I’m talking about Cataluña, where a referendum was held today on the new Estatut they’ve negotiated with Zapatero’s Spanish government. The new Estatut doesn’t include sovereignty, but it does declare Cataluña a “nation” (not the same as “country”!) and give more autonomy and control.

So, what happened? Well, though only 49% of the electorate voted, they accepted it with a 74% majority! (this is the third time in a row Cataluña has voted for an Estatuto. The previous ones were awhile ago, though — in 1932 and 1979.

There must be some trick to get people to vote for these things — I suspect it’s all in the wording…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 23h05 and is filed under Montreal, Spanish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.