Catalonia is burning by the way
Wildfires or arson? :0
Castillians want to remove paella
Paella is burning itself into the pan
Basically Madrid just convicted the leaders of the Catalan nationalist movement for treason. Catalonians does not think holding a popular vote about Catalonia's independency should be illegal. Madrid has since they abolished the Catalonian province government last year completely filled the state institutions with pro-Castillian yes men so any protest immediately turns into violence (Castillians love setting police and military on people).
You're not wrong in many regards, but the state institutions are currently back in the hands of the Catalonian Govern.... which is trying to square the circle by BOTH supporting the protests AND sending the (
famously brutal) regional police to quell the riots...
with predictable results.
My thoughts on the situation: While the genesis of this whole fiasco is with no doubt in Mariano Rajoy Brey (former Spanish president) wiping his ass with the Catalonian devolution charter back in the early 2010s for purely electoral purposes, and
specially his brutal crackdown in 2017, the management of the situation by the two major Catalonian nationalist parties have been less than brilliant (they've been basically fighting each other and one-upping each other. This has resulted in poor risk management and strategizing). As a result of this poor management in Madrid and Barcelona, things have gotten very dangerous indeed. Two years ago I warned in this same thread that we were risking a brand new terrorist group (sometimes it seems that Castilian nationalists*** are looking for exactly that). The way things are right now, I'd not be surprised if it happened in the next few weeks or months.
***: one interesting point about Castilian nationalists is that they claim to be
Spanish nationalists, much like English nationalists claim to be
British nationalists. TBH I've always thought that the UK and Spain have curiously similar histories, social structures, and troubled relationships with subnationalities.