Is a Ukrainian Oligarch Helping Trump Smear Biden to Evade US Corruption Charges?

By Robert Mackey, The Intercept

18 October 19

 

he conspiracy to reelect the president by misleading the American people about Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine continues, despite the impeachment inquiry triggered by revelations that Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried to coerce Ukraine’s government into investigating the former vice president.

Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, openly admitted on Thursday that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations requested by the White House.

The latest phase of the disinformation campaign has focused on what Giuliani calls crucial new evidence: an affidavit from the Ukrainian prosecutor Biden got fired in 2016. But the sudden appearance of this sworn statement, six months after Giuliani and his allies began claiming that Biden had acted with corrupt intent to get that prosecutor removed, raises questions about who orchestrated the filing of that affidavit and how the effort to smear Biden might be related to a Ukrainian billionaire’s fight against extradition to the United States to face bribery charges.

In the sworn statement, which was submitted to a court in Austria last month, Viktor Shokin, the former prosecutor general of Ukraine, claims that he was forced out because he was leading “a wide-ranging corruption probe” of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that paid Biden’s son Hunter to sit on its board.

In fact, there is no evidence that such a probe ever existed. Shokin was forced to resign following complaints from international donors to Ukraine, and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, that he had failed to pursue cases against corrupt former officials — including the owner of the gas company that employed Hunter Biden. By threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless Shokin was removed, Joe Biden had, in fact, made it more likely that his son’s employer would be prosecuted for corruption, not less likely.

Giuliani, however, is dedicated to spreading lies about Biden’s role in Ukraine on Trump’s behalf, so he has taken to waving Shokin’s affidavit in front television cameras with a theatrical flourish, as he did in an appearance on ABC in which he mistakenly stated that it had been online for six months. Shokin, in fact, delivered his sworn testimony in front of a notary in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Se

The Bidens are doing all they can to silence me, this is why! pic.twitter.com/Qp1MOgKNuD

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) September 30, 2019

That timing matters because it means that Shokin made his statement accusing Biden of corrupt intent only after Giuliani and his allies in the conservative media echo chamber had spent the previous six months loudly making the same claim without producing a shred of credible evidence.

Although Shokin makes no mention of it in his affidavit, Giuliani had reached out to him to discuss Biden even earlier, interviewing him via Skype in late 2018. That call was set up by Lev Parnas, a Republican donor who was born in Ukraine and had paid the former New York mayor $500,000 for legal advice before acting as Giuliani’s fixer in Ukraine. Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, were arrested last week and charged with making illegal campaign contributions, including $325,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee, using funds that had been provided by an unnamed Russian national.

In the text of the affidavit, Shokin even says that he first heard that Biden had boasted of getting him fired from a report on an American website in April of this year, when the conspiracy theory about Biden was first promoted by Giuliani and John Solomon, a far-right columnist for The Hill. “After my dismissal, Joe Biden made a public statement (1), saying — even bragging — that he had me fired,” Shokin said, according to a footnoted English translation of the Russian language statement that somehow made its way to Solomon three weeks after it was filed. “This is when it became clear that the real reason for my dismissal was my actions regarding … Burisma and Biden’s personal interest in that company,” Shokin continued.

A footnote in the affidavit cites as Shokin’s source an April 2, 2019 blog post from the American site LawandCrime.com, which in turn links back to a John Solomon column for The Hill, headlined, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian Nightmare.” In that column, Solomon had incorrectly reported that Ukraine had reopened an investigation of the gas company that added Hunter Biden to its board in 2014.

The affidavit was featured last week in a Trump campaign ad attacking Biden and the House impeachment inquiry, as part of the president’s $3.4 million propaganda effort targeting voters in the early Democratic primary states with disinformation.

The onscreen text in the Trump ad notably leaves out the fact that Shokin presents no direct evidence to support his claim that Biden had him removed to block an investigation of Burisma. “I assume,” Shokin says in a part of the statement not highlighted in the ad, “Burisma, which was connected with gas extraction, had the support of the US Vice-President Joe Biden because his son was on the Board of Directors.”

What is perhaps most interesting about the Shokin affidavit, though, is that it was made, as the former prosecutor says on the first page, “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash (‘DF’), for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”

Firtash, who also goes by the Ukrainian form of his first name, Dmytro, is a billionaire natural gas magnate, who made his fortune in the chaos of the post-Soviet era and was described by federal prosecutors in Illinois in court papers in 2017 as an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime. The oligarch has since denied such links, but a leaked State Department cable published by WikiLeaks described a 2008 conversation with the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, in which Firtash had “acknowledged ties to Russian organized crime figure Seymon Mogilevich, stating he needed Mogilevich’s approval to get into business in the first place.”

Firtash has been stranded in the Austrian capital, Vienna, since 2014, when federal prosecutors in Chicago unsealed an indictment charging him with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law that makes it a crime for corporations and their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials.

The Ukrainian billionaire was accused of “an alleged international racketeering conspiracy involving bribes of state and central government officials in India to allow the mining of titanium minerals” to supply Boeing, the Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer, in 2007. Firtash denies that he paid or recommended any bribes, and claims that his arrest, in the immediate aftermath of the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Yanukovych, was a politically motivated effort by the Obama administration to block him from influencing the direction of Ukrainian politics.

Firtash, a backer of Yanukovych, is also a former business partner of the deposed president’s American political consultant, Paul Manafort. In 2008, Firtash and Manafort planned an $850 million real estate project with the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan and convert it into a luxury property.

A court in Vienna, which reviewed 2014 State Department messages apparently dictating where and when Firtash should be arrested, accepted his claim that his arrest was politically motivated and initially blocked the extradition, setting off a five-year legal battle with the Justice Department.

In June, however, Austria’s Supreme Court ruled that Firtash could be extradited to stand trial in Chicago. That ruling was suspended the following month as the criminal court in Vienna is considering a request from the oligarch’s legal team to open a new proceeding based on newly submitted evidence, including Shokin’s affidavit and what the court spokesperson Christina Salzborn called “extremely extensive material.” In the affidavit, Shokin claims that the United States had directed Ukraine to prevent Firtash from returning home from Austria by threatening to arrest him, bolstering the oligarch’s claim that he was a victim of political persecution by the Obama administration.

While Giuliani and Firtash have both denied any direct collaboration, since July, the oligarch’s legal team has included two veteran Republican operatives, Victoria Toensing and her husband Joe diGenova, who also represent Trump. As Chris Wallace of Fox News reported recently, Toensing and diGenova have been “working with Giuliani to get oppo research on Biden.”

“According to a top U.S. official, all three were working off the books apart from the administration,” Wallace added. “The only person in government who knows what they were doing is President Trump.”

Toensing and diGenova did not respond to repeated requests to explain what role, if any, they played in getting Shokin to make his sworn statement or who provided an English translation of it to Solomon last month.

Firtash’s Austrian lawyer, Dieter Böhmdorfer — a former justice minister who was once the personal lawyer for the extreme-right Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider — also did not respond to questions about the provenance of the Shokin affidavit. Dan Webb, a former special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra investigation who now represents Firtash in Chicago, also did not respond to questions about who solicited Shokin’s testimony.

Two weeks ago, however, Toensing and diGenova used one of their regular appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News talk show to attack Biden and try to rehabilitate Shokin.

pic.twitter.com/nnZWgUDKMT

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2019

“We’ve known from the very beginning that Mr. Shokin was not a corrupt prosecutor,” diGenova said, in a clip that Trump shared on Twitter. “We’ve known that he was removed from office under pressure from Vice President Biden because he was investigating the vice president’s son, and because of the vice president’s connection to Burisma Holdings,” diGenova claimed. He went on to call the entire impeachment inquiry an “offensive” that had been launched merely “to protect Vice President Biden.”

A research file of documents provided to the State Department by Giuliani in March included the notes of his own interview with Shokin and an email from Solomon to Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas, suggesting that he was coordinating his research with them. The email included a preview copy of a column published later that day in The Hill, in which Solomon falsely accused anti-corruption activists in Ukraine of being a front group for George Soros and claimed that Marie Yovanovitch, then the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was in on the plot.

Toensing, diGenova, and Giuliani have consistently endorsed the conspiracy theory that former Ukrainian officials accused of corruption, and Paul Manafort, have been framed by anti-corruption activists in Ukraine as part of a secret Soros-backed plot.

As Jane Mayer observed in the New Yorker, “No journalist played a bigger part in fueling the Biden corruption narrative than John Solomon.” On Wednesday, Democracy Forward, a Washington advocacy organization, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking the State Department for all communications between Trump administration officials and Solomon, who is now a Fox News contributor.

“The public deserves to know whether high-level Trump administration officials used John Solomon as a vehicle to spread misinformation that President Trump used to justify his request that a foreign government investigate a political rival,” Charisma Troiano, a Democracy Forward spokesperson, said in a statement. “The requested records could expose potentially illegal government propaganda.”

Another reported connection between Giuliani’s efforts to bolster the anti-Biden conspiracy theory and the legal team working for Firtash is Parnas. He and Fruman were frequently spotted with Giuliani in Trump’s Washington hotel. Video posted on Facebook last month by a rabbi in Kyiv who has started a refugee camp modeled on the shtetl from “Fiddler on the Roof” showed them in the hotel lobby.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha pic.twitter.com/0mYC4mwdCh

— Leo Pelley (@LeoPelley) October 10, 2019

On September 20, a Reuters reporter photographed them having lunch in the hotel with a woman who looked like Toensing.

@AramRoston Was that Victoria Toensing sitting across from Giuliani, reflected in the mirror in your photograph? pic.twitter.com/WzVJpchRgW

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) October 10, 2019

After Parnas and Fruman were arrested last week at Dulles Airport in Washington with one-way tickets to Vienna, diGenova and Toensing told the Wall Street Journal that they had hired Parnas in July to work as an interpreter related to their representation of Firtash.

Giuliani, who told The Atlantic that he, too, was planning to fly to Vienna last week, said that Parnas and Fruman had traveled to the Austrian capital three to six times in recent months.

Before their arrest, Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd, who represents Parnas and Fruman, told congressional investigators that the two men might not provide documents requested by the impeachment inquiry because they had assisted Giuliani “in connection with his representation of President Trump.”

“Both men had worked in an unspecified capacity for Firtash before Parnas joined the Ukrainian’s legal team, according to a person familiar with the Florida men’s business dealings with Firtash,” Reuters reported on Saturday. The same unidentified source told the news agency that Firtash had been “financing” the activities of Parnas and Fruman. Their expenses had included private jet flights in the United States and travel to Vienna, according to the Reuters source.

What exactly, Parnas, a Ukrainian-born U.S. citizen, and Fruman, a Belarusian-born U.S. citizen, were doing for Firtash is not yet clear, but if he was paying their expenses while they helped Giuliani look for ways to smear Biden, the oligarch was, at least indirectly, helping Trump.

CNN reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors in New York said that the government intends to produce “fairly voluminous” discovery material in the case against Parnas, Fruman, and two associates, including email and other communications from more than 10 accounts and financial records from more than 50 banks.

According to federal prosecutors, when Parnas pressed a Republican congressman to ask the State Department to remove or recall Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, he was acting, “at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.” In her testimony to the impeachment inquiry last week, Yovanovitch said that she had come under attack for supporting the anti-corruption drive in Ukraine, which made her an enemy of former officials and oligarchs who benefited from the old system. Under her leadership, she said, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv’s efforts “were intended, and evidently succeeded, in thwarting corrupt interests in Ukraine, who fought back by selling baseless conspiracy theories to anyone who would listen.”

“Sadly,” Yovanovitch added, “someone was listening, and our nation is the worse off for that.”

Until July, Firtash was represented by Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s former lawyer who now represents Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer who turned on the president and confessed to tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress. By replacing Davis with Toensing and diGenova, and getting an affidavit from Shokin in which he repeats the allegations about Biden, Firtash might have adopted a new legal strategy aimed at supplying the American president with material for his campaign and hoping that a reelected Trump might be grateful enough to get his attorney general, William Barr, to drop the corruption charges.

Toensing also has a personal connection to Barr. In June, her son Brady, who worked at the family firm in Washington, was hired by Barr as a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy.

Firtash’s legal team told Simon Shuster of Time magazine in June, when his extradition appeared likely, that they were prepared to produce evidence that would embarrass Obama administration officials. “This will be very tough against the previous administration,” one of Firtash’s lawyers said then. “With the current administration, I think they will like it.”

Such a strategy — of attacking Obama and helping Trump to smear Biden — might have a chance to succeed. Last week, it emerged that Trump, in 2017, was willing to consider Giuliani’s request to drop charges against a Turkish-Iranian gold trader, Reza Zarrab, who was accused by federal prosecutors of helping Iran evade sanctions, if Turkey agreed to free a Christian pastor to please his evangelical base.

Then there is also the fact that Trump, before he entered politics, made public comments deriding the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law Firtash is accused of violating. On May 15, 2012, Trump took part in a televised discussion of a just-published New York Times report that Walmart de Mexico “had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country,” possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The investigation would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize the following year, but Trump, who was asked about it during his weekly phone-in to the CNBC business talk show “Squawk Box,” was not impressed.

“Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” Trump said, referring to bribes paid to local officials. “It’s a horrible law, and it should be changed. I mean, we’re like the policemen for the world, it’s ridiculous.”

“Every other country in the world is doing it, we’re not allowed to,” he complained. “The world is laughing at us — we’re a bunch of dopes.”

Catalunya's Revolt Will Shake Spain Again

By Simón Vázquez, Jacobin

18 October 19

On November 10, Spain faces its fourth general election in as many years. As the national question continues to polarize Spanish politics, the rising protests in Catalonia are reenergizing the pro-independence left — and causing further strategic dilemmas for Podemos.

ovember 10 will see Spain’s second general election of 2019, after the center-left PSOE failed to reach a governmental pact with Unidas Podemos. While each party blamed the other for the breakdown in talks, in truth only Podemos was ever really interested in forming a progressive coalition, as it accepted humiliating conditions in its bid to take up ministries in a PSOE-led government.

The approach taken by Podemos leaders around Pablo Iglesias never enjoyed unanimous backing. The leadership turned a deaf ear to the radical left (including both Izquierda Unida and Anticapitalistas) as well as the supporters of the party’s former number two Íñigo Errejón, who all preferred to maintain Podemos’s oppositional role even while reelecting the PSOE’s Pedro Sánchez as prime minister.

Such a choice was also favored by Catalunya’s biggest pro-independence party, the center-left Esquerra Republicana. It offered unconditional support for such an arrangement — a position much criticized in Catalunya, given both the trial of the leaders who organized the October 2017 independence referendum and Sánchez’s refusal to broker a negotiated route out of the Catalan conflict.

From a Catalan perspective, the greatest expression of Podemos’s genuflection to the PSOE came in September, when Iglesias said that if his party entered government with Sánchez it could hypothetically support a Spanish state intervention in Catalunya’s institutions. This would mean allowing the PSOE to break up the Catalan parliament and government using Article 155 of the Spanish constitution.

Conflicts over this question dogged both April’s general election and the talks which followed; in this sense, November’s contest could be considered something of a rerun. Yet it also takes place in a moment of heightened tensions, not least given the prison sentences handed down to pro-independence leaders on Monday. As the repression of the Catalan movement escalates, the Left finds itself in a strategic bind.

Trial

This difficult situation especially owes to the recent trial of Catalan pro-independence leaders, which resulted in a series of harsh prison sentences. After the trial began earlier in 2019, this judicial assault intensified on September 24 as Spain’s National Court ordered the detention of nine activists from the Committees for the Defense of the Republic, popular organizations that emerged two years ago in order to defend the polling booths during Catalunya’s October 1, 2017 independence referendum. These committees galvanized an ongoing mobilization during that vote and especially during the general strike that followed two days later.

After these nine activists were arrested, just two were released pending trial; the other seven were jailed under accusation of “terrorist organizing” and having stocks of “explosive materials.” In fact, they were only found in possession of chemicals used for everyday workplace or cleaning purposes; the charges were leveled even despite the total lack of violent actions throughout the civil disobedience campaigns and mobilizations of Catalan society that began in 2012.

If there has, indeed, been violence in this conflict, it instead came from the other side. Lawyers for the jailed activists (totaling sixteen people, including former members of the Catalan government) have denounced degrading treatment of prisoners amounting to torture, for instance interrogations lasting over twenty hours at a time.

This marks the return of the authoritarian “deep state,” stirring memories of the dirty war that peaked in the Basque Country in the 1980s.

Catalan society has been quick to respond, with mass mobilizations filling the streets of the main towns and cities to demand release for all political prisoners. Pro-independence parties have been unanimous in condemning the arrests and calling for the release of all those who have been jailed.

Conversely, Spanish-unionist forces have tried to create a situation of alarm by comparing this — utterly peaceful conflict — to low-intensity wars such as those seen in theaters like the Basque Country or the North of Ireland. Through such comparisons, Spanish unionism hopes to set itself up in opposition to a strawman “violent threat.”

In this same vein, mass media whipped up the supposed “terrorist” menace, in the bid to give Spanish society a totally unreal image of the Catalan “danger.” The aim, here, was also to force all political actors to take a position regarding this supposed “violence.” With Catalan figures compelled to define themselves in opposition to a nonexistent “violence,” it is surreptitiously hinted that such a threat could, indeed, exist — a tactic recalling George Lakoff’s “don’t think of an elephant.”

Another result of this strategy is that political forces across the spectrum now brandish Spanish nationalism as a means of picking up votes. Yet historically, Spanish nationalism has only ever benefited the systemic parties and in particular the Right. The deep state, the judiciary, and the public prosecutor alone know what role they will be playing in November’s election. But whenever such actors enter the stage, it’s never good news for peripheral nations, social movements, or the Left.

The Repeat Election in Catalunya

In Catalunya it was widely expected that the negotiations following Spain’s last general election in April would, indeed, lead to impasse, and the repeat election now to be held next month. But if the two largest pro-independence parties struck different postures during the negotiations over the summer, at heart their positions were built on the same fundamental principles.

Former president Carles Puigdemont’s center-right Junts per Catalunya took an apparently “tougher” attitude, reticent toward any coalition, while the center-left Esquerra Republicana appeared more submissive and open to propping up a government without setting conditions. Yet in fact both were prepared to back a PSOE-Podemos government, with which they would have had further possibilities to negotiate.

This was especially apparent in the final weeks of the negotiations between the PSOE and Podemos, before talks broke down. Here, Esquerra’s role became increasingly moderate and open to a pact, centering its strategy on a progressive government that could have issued a pardon signed off by the King or (preferably) negotiated an amnesty for the Catalan political prisoners, without them having to acknowledge their “crimes.”

This hope was thwarted, as Catalunya like the rest of Spain heads for fresh elections on November 10. But the political situation has changed, here as elsewhere. This is particularly true of Catalunya’s pro-independence left, making an unprecedented step into the Spanish electoral arena.

Its biggest single expression — the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP) had, historically, taken an abstentionist position in all Spanish elections, considering these foreign to the Catalan political context in which it operates. However, others on the pro-independence left did make a historic first step into Spanish electoral politics in the April 28 contest, as Poble Lliure stood in partnership with Som Alternativa — an organization led by former Podemos MP Albano Dante Fachín — and the Pirate Party. Their Republican Front only just failed to win seats in the Spanish Congress, sparking a substantial change of approach within the pro-independence left.

On September 20, a few days before the repeat election was announced, an article by lawyer Xavier Monge — a former member of CUP’s national leadership — stressed the need to participate in the elections, with a plan solely focused on self-determination, an amnesty for prisoners, and the objective of making it impossible for the Spanish Congress to govern. This generated a storm of controversy online and even a communiqué by Endavant, one of the forces most hostile to electoral participation, calling for a boycott of the Spanish elections.

These developments forced CUP to open up a wider debate within the organization, which ultimately concluded in a national political council meeting which decided — by just one vote — in favor of a first bid to stand in the Spanish elections. Just as is usually the case in CUP, the debate featured a high level of grassroots participation and moments of high tension.

The fact that the CUP is standing in Spanish-state elections for the first time could shake even further the already inevitably agitated political space on the Catalan left. The first surveys suggest it will win between one and five seats in the Spanish Congress. Its candidates in Barcelona include members of the CUP national leadership (and former MPs) Mireia Vehí, Albert Botran and Eulàlia Reguant.

Not so Left-Wing

Another new force in the November 10 vote is Más País, the party of former Podemos number two Iñigo Errejón, which already made some headway in this May’s municipal and regional elections in the Comunidad de Madrid. Some cynics even say that Pablo Iglesias did not give in to PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez’s demands in coalition talks because he did not want to give Errejón time to rally his forces and build alliances in the various territories of Spain.

Errejón’s list for Congress is built on alliances with Compromís (sovereigntists for the region of Valencia), Chunta Aragonesista (Aragón regionalists), and splits among Podemos cadres around the rest of Spain. Only in Murcia has Errejón’s party been able to win over the ex-Podemos members of the regional parliament. Its presence in some Andalusian provinces has, however, sparked conflict, it having seemed likely that Adelante Andalucía would maintain its autonomy and receive the backing of the whole political space formerly represented by Podemos. Errejón’s candidacy has also sparked conflict in the province of Barcelona, where until a few hours before the deadline he had lacked enough signatures to stand. Here, he has clashed with the loose tendency represented by mayor Ada Colau, who considers the Más País election bid a “betrayal” of the unity of her political space.

With a discourse full of political commonplaces and pro-system logic, Errejón’s new party offers a left-wing version of the aesthetics of Macronism, like the French president relying on empty signifiers that can serve as Trojan horses for all manner of contradictory ideas. For instance, even when Errejón raised such a proposal as the thirty-two-hour working week, his plan also included the possibility of a further deregulation of workers’ shifts.

However, at the same time, Errejón has also sought to stake out his left-wing credentials. When was accused of failing to clearly outline a political program, he quickly sought to dismiss such claims by presenting a list of demands directly copying Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party (for instance, the call for a four-day week) or else Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

The State’s Prisons

After a week of rumors, October 14 saw the official sentencing of the Catalan leaders who had been put on trial earlier this year. The court issued a thirteen-year jail term for former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras (the longest of any of the defendants) and twelve years for three advisors, Raül Romeva, Jordi Turull, and Dolors Bassa. Each of these were convicted of sedition and the misappropriation of state funds (i.e., in order to organize the referendum); two other defendants (Josep Rull and Joaquim Forn) were absolved on this latter count and condemned to ten and a half years’ jail time. Former parliamentary president Carme Forcadell was sentenced to eleven and a half years’ imprisonment for sedition, and civil society leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart received nine years for this same crime.

This decision soon sparked protests. For some weeks the popular independence movement has been gathered around an anonymous platform called Tsunami Democràtic, which operates via a Telegram channel. Today, it has 250,000 people signed up, as it directs a fresh wave of nonviolent civil disobedience across Catalonia. Indeed, as news of the sentences spread on Monday, Tsunami Democràtic immediately reacted by calling an occupation of Barcelona’s Josep Tarradellas airport, estimated to have involved the participation of some 25,000 people, marching along the motorway from Barcelona and blocking off the main entries to the city. The police repression aimed at unblocking the access routes to the airport led to a pitched battle, leaving dozens wounded; one person even lost an eye.

Tsunami has called at least a week of mobilizations, designed to grow both in intensity and across the territorial expanse of Catalunya over coming days. At the same time, blockades are spreading, and Committees for the Defence of the Republic are starting up again, as they did at the moment of the 2017 referendum. The fact that the police violence was exercised by joint Spanish and Catalan forces may well generate disaffection toward the main pro-independence parties (JxCat and Esquerra) and shift part of pro-independence opinion toward forces like CUP.

But the possibility of Catalan revolt, extending across the next weeks and months, could also produce unexpected effects across Spanish politics in the run up to the November 10 general election. It may shake the hornets’ nest of the Spanish nationalist vote — something which always benefits the Right. Seeking to put the brakes on this effect, the PSOE’s Sánchez is turning to the most nationalist of discourse, in the bid to “save Spain.” The Spanish state is again displaying a profound regime crisis in which, as the late PSOE minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba put it, it is fine to beat up on democracy if that means preserving national unity.

Make Spain Great Again

A Spanish nationalist framing has, indeed, taken over the whole election campaign: each party’s election slogan has picked up the word “Spain,” from the PSOE’s Ahora España (“Now, for Spain”) to the liberal-nationalist Ciudadanos’s España en marcha (“Spain on the Move”; a clear reference to Emmanuel Macron’s “En Marche!”), or the far-right Vox’s España siempre (“forever Spain”). We also see this turn in Iñigo Errejón’s party name Más País (“More Country”), and, most disturbingly, the conservative Partido Popular’s ¿Ellos o nosotros? (“Them or Us?”). Only Podemos and parties in peripheral regions have not fronted such Spanish-nationalist slogans.

This also demonstrates the importance of the national question in the current Spanish situation, and in particular the Catalan crisis. Can the Left break out of a purely nationalist framing? This does, indeed, seem difficult — after all, when nationalism becomes a force, it has a habit of leaving its mark on everything.

Yet not all is lost. The days since Monday’s verdict have seen sharp clashes, with the Catalan people ever more at odds with the pro-independence government and a rising prospect of large-scale revolt. The people in the streets has its program — an amnesty for prisoners, self-determination, the departure of Spanish police and military forces, the end of repression, and the resignation of the Catalan government. After three days of confrontations in Barcelona and the other main cities, Friday’s general strike called by the pro-Catalan unions is backed by all the pro-independence forces.

After the victorious mobilizations in Ecuador and the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, Catalunya could prove to be a fresh focus of conflict, in this case on the territory of the old continent itself. In the weeks before Spain goes to the polls on November 10, this is also a situation that can benefit the forces of the Catalan left — so long as they are able to channel the spirit of revolt.