Really.. I didn't know this. So, a region that is pro-socialist wants to secede from Spain because their wealth is being redistributed to other parts of Spain? This would fit entirely with my overall view of socialists, which is that they are nearly all hypocrites.
The Catalans live in never - never land. They have the highest per capita debt load in Spain and have been spending like drunken sailors for decades on foolish projects such as their attempt to impose Catalan as a language and remove Spanish entirely (although all the Catalan politicians send their own kids to boarding school in Madrid so that they can learn to speak proper Spanish and not be restricted in their future careers by knowing only the internationally and academically useless Catalan). They have a radical left that riots on a regular basis, a student class that expects to become perpetual and be carried through life, and a really large Muslim population, not only in Barcelona but in little towns. The Church was so full of Leftwing catalan nationalism that it was completely discredited, aven though BXVI has replaced a number of their bishops. And of course corruption is rampant. Large numbers of their wealthy have already fled and live in Andorra.
The EU will not accept new states, and I doubt that an exception would be made for them. They’ll get out there and either become a full-bore anachronistic marxist state like the old albania, or limp along for awhile until their Islamic population takes over.
Common sense obviously intervened with the voters, however.
well, the wealth being redistributed is the "trigger" for the current move, but the Catalans always see themselves separate from the Castilians
Spain has a number of distinct regions -- like the Gaelic origin people of Galicia with a language that is more similar to Portuguese than Castilian, to the dominant Castilian (that we call Spanish)
and then of course there are the Basques whose language is a language isolate -- with some conjecturing that it is related to Georgian but no proof for that
London English or rather the upper class English replaced all of that with standardised Oxford English
Or you can take German -- standard German is low German, while the German spoken in Austria and Bavaria and Swabia and northern Switzerland is Allemagnic -- High German. to the west, there were Burgundian dialects which are dead now