At an Extraordinary Council Meeting, held in Brussels, the ALDE Party announced the expulsion of its Catalan member party, PDeCAT, issuing the following press release;
Delegates from more than one third of the ALDE Party full members convened in Brussels on 27 October 2018 for an extraordinary Council Meeting.
With a majority of 2/3 of the votes cast, the Council took the decision to expel PDeCAT (Parti Democratica, Catalonia) from ALDE Party membership, effective immediately.
This decision does not imply any position of the ALDE Party on internal Spanish political affairs.
The ALDE Party keeps its door open to any new liberal and democratic political movements from Catalonia that may want to join us in the future.
The ALDE Party urges all political actors to engage in dialogue to enable a sustainable solution.
The grounds for the expulsion were that senior figures in the Party and, in particular its predecessor, CDC, were involved in significant corruption, potentially bringing the ALDE Party into disrepute.
Chair of the Liberal Democrat Federal International Relations Committee, Robert Woodthorpe-Browne, noted on Twitter;
Very sad at overwhelming vote to expel Catalan liberal party PDeCAT from ALDE Party. They did not help themselves by failing to send a top Board member to argue their case. Instead a brilliant young member spoke well, but with no concrete evidence of commitment from his leaders
— R Woodthorpe Browne (@robertbrowne1) October 27, 2018
confirming that the Liberal Democrat delegation had not voted in support of the Catalans.
No ALDE Party Member has been expelled in recent times on grounds other than inability to pay its membership fee or cessation of existence.
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9 Comments
A fuller, more balanced report on this story is available at…
http://www.catalannews.com/politics/item/alde-expels-puigdemont-s-party
Superficially this sounds like a good idea but in reality it further identifies ALDE with supranational sentiment and with the nation state. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but this party is supposed to be one that believes in devolving power and national and regional self-determination. Consequently, whatever the technicalities may be, this sends out the message that liberalism in its European guise is centralist and little more than a neo-colonialist movement. What message does this send to the Catalan people? To the Welsh, Scots and Cornish, to the Corse, Bretons and to Occitania? That liberalism now identifies with centralisation and repression. A sad day. I’ve been a Liberal and Lib Dem member since 1973 and have never questioned that before. I will now.
It is a continuing scandal that the ONLY Spanish party within ALDE is Cuidadanos. This party is in an unofficial legislative alliance with the conservative Partido Popular and consistently votes in parliament for policies which as Liberals, we should abhor. For example, they have resisted abolition of the hated Ley Mordaza which makes it illegal to criticise government officials in public, or to take photos of police brutality at demonstrations. They have consistently opposed measures to remove the relics of the Franco from public buildings and street names. These people are NOT liberals…
Mike Tribe – the Scandal is that we took so long to throw them out – a party who declared UDI against the wishes of the majority of the Catalan People – a party whose current head
Quim Torra the President of Catalunya who has a History of Xenophobic and Racist statements the the Party should bot remotely associate itself with – as for Franco half the population of Spain fought on his side – as for Police Brutality – when your Regional Police Force is working hand in glove with a Political Party trying to bypass the rule of Law and Democracy – thats brutality -and funny enough at the centre of PdeCAT is corruption – and you think we should be associating ourselves with them – scary !!!
@ James Alexander. The Regional Police supported the democratically elected government of Catalonia which won a referendum to declare independence from Spain. That sounds more legitimate than the Franco apologist Partido Popular – no longer in power after its corrupt illegitimacy was exposed. PdeCAT are not perfect but no less so than many other dodgy members of ALDE. The FDP spring to mind.
James Alexander: I would certainly agree that PdeCAT is a corrupt party and that its liberal credentials are far from clear, but the point I was trying to make — clearly unsuccessfully in your case — is that it is pretty ridiculous that the one “Liberal” party in Spain, according to ALDE, is Cuidadanos. I nowhere suggested that “we should be associating ourselves” with PdeCAT but rather that we shouldn’t be associating ourselves with C’s.
I find some of your views regarding the history of Spain somewhat strange, especially the statement that “half the population of Spain” fought on Franco’s side.. Franco won the Civil War, not because of popular support (his “side” lost the last free elections) but largely through the support of foreign forces, whether is be Moroccan mercenaries, or German and Italian “volunteers”…
Did PdeCAT “declare UDI against the wishes of the majority of the Catalan People”? (By the way, I don’t quite follow what capitalisation rules you’re using…) How do you know this? The nationalist parties won a majority in the regional parliament, and their attempt to organise a referendum to test the views of “the majority of the Catalan People” was sabotaged by the use of brutal interventions by paramilitary police shipped in specifically for the purpose from other parts of Spain. I also fail to understand how “trying to bypass the rule of Law and Democracy” can be classed as “brutality”…
The previous Spanish Government dealt with Catalonia in a heavy handed way but there is a new Socialist led Government now which would need the support of the Catalan deputies to survive so they must have agreed something although the Socialists have normally opposed Catalan independence in the past.
There have been allegations that the electoral districts for the Catalan Parliament were drawn to favour nationalists at the expense of their opponents. There are quite a lot of Spanish speaking people living there but rural areas are more inclined to the nationalists and are alleged to have disproportionate representation.
Franco was supported by Hitler, Mussolini and Moroccan mercenaries but the Republic was supported by Stalin and various foreign international brigades mostly on the left. It was a civil war and there were two sides with differing viewpoints. Just because the Right did not win the previous election does not mean they would never have won again because they have in the post Franco era. Spain may not be a perfect democracy but it does have a left -right divide like most countries.
Can Spain afford to give up Catalonia. It seems that when an area becomes prosperous it wants to have all the wealth for itself and let the rest stay poor. Maybe London ought to demand independence?
Cuidadanos support the continued imprisonment of Catalan nationalist leaders on charges of sedition for supporting independence. Is this liberal? Whether or not you agree or disagree with PdeCAT, whether or not you believe their government resulted from skewed seat distribution, whether or not you believe the party to be steeped in corruption, as a liberal, it’s really difficult to agree to the imprisonment of elected representatives of the Catalan people…
Here is the latest on the Spanish legal persecution of Catalan leaders:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/catalan-separatists-indicted-rebellion-trial-nears-58920208