SPAIN: Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has reached an 11th-hour "global agreement" with Catalonia to reform its autonomy statute granting it greater self-rule and going a long way towards meeting its demand to be described as a nation.
On Saturday evening, Mr Zapatero had called for a "final effort" to reach an agreement. The accord came in the early hours of yesterday morning after a marathon negotiating session with leaders of the moderate Catalan Convergence and Union Party (CiU) in his Moncloa Palace office. The draft pact is the culmination of almost a year of often bitter cross-party talks that on several occasions came close to collapse.
The Catalan political analyst Enric Sopena described it as a "historic" agreement and said it was a triumph for political consensus and a personal victory for Mr Zapatero.
"He has brought off a solution which many believed was impossible," Mr Sopena said.
Catalonia has been governed by an autonomy statute, approved in 1979 when Spain devolved into 17 autonomous regions, less than four years after the death of the dictator Franco. They already have their own regional government, parliament and police force, as well as control over education and health systems, roads, development, environment and culture.
But they have always demanded more, including the right to collect their own taxes, use their own language over Spanish and, most important of all, to describe Catalonia as a "nation" with Catalan as their nationality instead of Spanish.
Yesterday's accord goes a long way to recognising and granting these demands. It includes the words "nation" and "nationality" but they appear only in the preamble and not in the body of the document, which also gives them a 50 per cent share with Madrid over taxation through the establishment of a joint tax agency.