Who really won Sunday's referendum on Catalan autonomy? It all depends who you listen to, writes Paddy Woodworth
The ever-deeper divisions in Spanish politics are clearly illustrated by utterly contradictory readings of the same statistics from last weekend's referendum on a new political dispensation for Catalonia.
According to the centre-left Spanish government, which backed the new Estatut, or Statute of Autonomy, three quarters of Catalan voters were in favour of the measure. Yet the Spanish conservatives, who regard the new statute as catastrophic, claim that two-thirds of Catalans oppose it. They now demand that the whole project should be annulled in the name of democracy.
The key to this conundrum is that trusty friend of all those who want to manipulate electoral statistics: high abstention. The Catalans stayed away from the polling booths in droves last Sunday.
Spain's major opposition party, the right-wing Partido Popular (PP), says that this statute opens the flood gates to "the liquidation of constitutional Spain", as their party leader, Mariano Rajoy, put it yesterday. But not that many Catalans were listening to them.
In the increasingly shrill analysis of the PP, the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is hell-bent on "wiping out the Spanish right, socially and politically". They say he is enlisting radical Catalan nationalists, (and even Basque terrorists) to help his Socialist Party (PSOE) to help him do the job.
In fact, at first sight, neither of the big Spanish parties can take much comfort from Sunday's results, though both are claiming substantial victories. Three quarters of those who did vote, voted Yes. But this is hardly a ringing endorsement for Zapatero, when you put it in the context of a mere 49 per cent turnout.
The conservative newspaper ABC was quick to point out that Zapatero had told a Basque nationalist leader that even 51 per cent support was an unacceptable basis for a new status for the Basque Country.
So it sounds a little hollow when the prime minister, and the Socialist First Minister in Catalonia, Pasqual Maragall, both describe the result as "final and unquestionable", though it is certainly legally legitimate.
But Rajoy is also conveniently amnesiac in saying that those who abstained back the PP's line on the statute. The PP called for a No vote, not a stay-away protest. Only 20 per cent of voters, or 10 per cent of the electorate, supported them. The PP cannot even claim all of these votes for themselves. Their leftist arch-enemies, the Esquerra Republica de Catalunya (ERC) also campaigned on a No platform, though their case was the polar opposite of the PP's: they said the statute did not go far enough towards full Catalan independence from Spain.
With the total No vote running well below the combined PP and ERC votes in the last election, both of these parties should be quite worried by the result.
Assuming that the PP's threatened appeal against the statute to the Constitutional Court will fail, as seems likely, what difference will the new dispensation make to the Catalans, and to Spain as a whole? The answer is: not a lot.
This statute will probably not bring huge changes, either in principle or in practice. This may indicate that Zapatero's policies are a lot cleverer, and even more Machiavellian, than the PP give him credit for. He gives the impression of being a reforming, even a radical prime minister, yet the more things change, the more they may remain the same.
This statute did start out as a quite radical proposal, when it had the backing of the ERC, then in the Catalan government with the Socialists in Barcelona. At a crucial moment, however, Zapatero stepped into the negotiations, apparently over the heads of the Catalan section of his own party.
He gained the support of more moderate Catalan nationalists of the centre-right Convergencia i Unió (CiU) for a watered down version of the original proposal.
This was quite a stroke, because CiU are natural allies of the PP on economic issues. Zapatero has left the Spanish conservatives looking very isolated in a key region, as the outcome of the referendum confirms. The compromise statute shifted the controversial recognition of Catalonia as a "nation" from the main text to the preface, where it has no legal force.
And it hedged around dramatic proposals to devolve control of the taxation system with many qualifications. These are likely to protect the financial interests of the Spanish state as a whole. Yes, the new framework is an expansion of the already extensive powers enjoyed by Catalonia under its previous statute, in many areas.
But it does not represent any sort of stride towards independence, or the break-up of Spain.
However, the PP's alarmist claims to this effect are getting a hearing in the rest of Spain, where they are rallying the hidden but very powerful forces of Spanish nationalism.
Zapatero has won on points on the Catalan question, but he now faces a much more dangerous test.
Last week he said that he would soon enter into talks with the Basque terrorist group Eta, now on "permanent ceasefire", despite the massive recent street demonstrations which the PP has organised to oppose any Basque peace process.
Here the PP's language pushes the bounds of democratic discourse, accusing the prime minister of "betraying Spain" and "surrendering to terrorism".
Most analysts believe that it is in fact Eta which will have to surrender its core principles in any discussions. But whether the Spanish public is disposed to support Zapatero's initiative remains a very open, and very volatile question.
• Paddy Woodworth is a writer on Spanish affairs and author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale University Press)