This year marks five decades since the celebration of the Diada in Sant Boi de Llobregat — the first major political demonstration in Catalonia after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco — and the president Salvador Illa has wanted to infuse the traditional institutional speech on the occasion of September 11, Catalonia’s national day, with the spirit of that anniversary. “We are and want to continue being one people. Because the nation is the renewed consensus of the citizens in favor of coexistence and the common good,” said the head of the Government in the video recorded at the Palau de la Generalitat. “In our home, hatred has no place,” he added.
The speech, delivered on the eve of the Diada, closed two days of events prior to the commemoration. One of them took place at the Fossar de les Moreres, in the Born of Barcelona, where once again the far-right independence supporters and antifascist movements clashed in the street. Faced with the rise of Aliança Catalana — a party that completely amends the integrative Catalanism on which Catalan society has pivoted in recent decades — and the presence of Vox, Illa appealed to preserve coexistence. “Catalonia stands on the side of peace and the founding values of the European Union,” he assured.
The head of the Government repeated several times in the institutional message the need to highlight “the wealth and diversity” of Catalonia, the result of “the human bonds we have generated between Catalans and people from all over who have found their home and country here.” “We cannot allow anything or anyone to endanger coexistence in Catalonia. In our home, hatred has no place,” he emphasized.
Illa also asked Catalans to act with the “same unity of the country” that, as he recalled, was one of the great values of the Diada fifty years ago, when autonomy had to be recovered after the dictatorship. “Behind it beat the strength of a common pulse: the same feeling of belonging. The same collective, fraternal, and human sense of the country. In Catalonia, we are and want to continue being one people,” he quoted.
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The nation, Illa continued, “is the renewed consensus of the citizens in favor of coexistence and the common good,” where people born in different places “today feel fully Catalan, with duties also to fulfill. No one is more Catalan than anyone else.”
The commemoration of the Diada continues this Friday the 11th with, among other events, the traditional floral offering at the tomb of Rafael Casanova, the demonstration called by the independence entities Assemblea Nacional Catalana and Òmnium Cultural, and the official event that the Generalitat will hold at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya.
