The political act that has celebrated Cultural Omnium for September 11, National Day of Cataloniahas served to show a good part of the characteristics that mark the DNA of the entity, which with 190,000 members is the most important in sovereignty.
Its president, Xavier Antich, has pronounced a critical discourse with the current situation, marked by fracture, demobilization and lack of shared directionbut at the same time it has filled it with a constructive tone to call for reversing the paralysis of the independence movement through a “new strategic framework” that allows it to widen its perimeter and weave new “complicities”.
Once again, the tone and message of Òmnium distances it notably from the ANC and one of the consequences is its ability to convene: at the event, held at the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona, a good part of the Government was present -with the president Aragonès at the forefront-, representatives of the leadership of the ERC, Junts, the CUP or the Comuns and the leaders of the CCOO and UGT unions of Catalonia.
In fact, despite the criticism, has defended the necessary role of political parties and institutions and has sent a clearly inclusive message: “To win we need to be stronger, [estar] in more places, more organized and more determined. Everyone is needed and everyone has a role.”
Antich, in the framework of the Festa de la Llibertat that Òmnium has organized for the 20th year, has admitted that at the moment “there is no shared strategy or common objective; at this point we only have legitimate strategies on the part, but confronted, and this causes discouragement, demobilization and, above all, a lot of disorientation”. “We are not where we want, we are where they want; paralyzed”he added, to insist that “the disagreement is causing a large part of the agents to withdraw and thus it is impossible to move forward”.
Òmnium’s recipe to turn the situation around is for the Catalan national liberation movement to equip itself with a “new strategic framework”, which the entity has promised to “make possible”.
“We are not talking about recovering formulas that have not worked, we need new ways, new voices and new complicities, among which we are already, but we also need complicity with new agents. The formula of these five years of blockade is no longer useful to us”, Xavier Antich underlined, concluding by saying “we want to open a new country cycle that allows us to address the democratic resolution of the conflict” and ensure that “the future of Catalonia will be decided by the citizenship of Catalonia and no one will be able to prevent it”.
“We will not give in to the temptation of anti-politics”
Unlike the ANC, Òmnium Cultural defends that “there is no people that can decide its future without institutions and parties”. “We will never give in to the populist temptation of anti-politics, but there are many things that are not going well and we have to be demanding as we have always been”, Antich stressed in his parliament, in which he defended the need for the independence movement to change the dynamic, open and manages to “strengthen networks within the movement itself and beyond its perimeter. The democratic path does not only challenge pro-independence supporters, but also pro-sovereignty supporters, Catalan supporters and democrats.”
Despite praising the referendum of October 1, 2017, as the result of a “cycle of mobilization, organization and empowerment of more than a decade”, Antich has defended that the current cycle is exhausted and needs to be “refreshed” and that happens by “looking forward”. “We need to move forward and that means strengthening ourselves and building, we need to organize ourselves better and mobilize ourselves permanently,” he added.
Finally, at the beginning of his speech he also attacked the Spanish State, which has assured that it persecutes the independence movement “because it knows what we want and has given up trying to deal with it through democratic means”. “The State is very aware of our strength. They know what we have done and they know that we will do it again, hence their repression”has finished.
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