The origin of Els Segadors goes back to the end of the 19th century, but it was not until the last years of the 20th that it was officially considered the national anthem of Catalonia. This was approved by Parliament on this day 30 years ago. On February 17, 1993, the Chamber agreed on the establishment of this symbol with a unanimity that is unthinkable today: even the Popular Party supported the initiative and the anthem "became its own," in the words of the then deputy Alejo Vidal-Quadras, who years he would later help found Vox.
Although Els Segadors had not obtained official status until then, the truth is that the citizens of Catalonia had already assumed this popular song as their anthem long before. Just needed to formalize it. The Parliament gave it the rank of law to give it the same importance as the symbol of the flag, which was already established in the 1979 Statute of Autonomy in its fourth article. "If it has always been considered that the flag and the anthem are the most representative symbols of a people, it seems logical and convenient to give the two symbols specific legal recognition," argued the text, which would enter into force on March 4 after its publication in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat (DOGC).
The plenary session diary shows how placid the debate was, but with some exceptions. Only the PP established a different position, which caused a furor in the rest of the benches, although it also registered the bill in a unitary manner together with the rest of the parties.
"The Popular Party makes the anthem its own, which from today will be everyone's," proclaimed Alejo Vidal-Quadras, at the time a deputy and president of the Catalan PP, from the lectern of Parliament, who would later go to the European Parliament and would create Vox in 2013. Even so, he distanced himself, with his intervention, from the rest of the parliamentary groups, considering that the lyrics of the anthem allude to the "delivery of the Principality to a foreign power, that is, of the most flagrant and treacherous modality of high treason", in reference to the Guerra dels Segadors of 1640. "When I said that they had broken fidelity to the natural lord (Felipe IV), the rest of the deputies became furious", recalls Vidal-Quadras with a sneer, in statements to La Vanguardia 30 years after that plenary session.
The speech of the popular leader contrasted with the rest of the interventions that the political groups made in the rostrum. Vidal-Quadras claims his "discordant" tone, a speech that he assures was not easy due to the "monolithic" Parliament around Catalan issues. The substantive discrepancy that he had exhibited did not prevent the favorable vote of the popular, a decision that the former vice president of the European Parliament attributes, in a way, to the influence of the party leadership in Madrid. "With these issues they were fearful," he says.
The other groups (CiU, PSC, ERC and IC), on the other hand, manifested themselves in the opposite direction in a unitary manner. Catalanist allegations predominated, recalling the de facto character of Els Segadors anthem, because that was how it had permeated the population and also the institutions. Without going any further, a year earlier it had sounded at the opening of the Olympic Games in Montjuïc. It was time, they claimed, to "sanction" it in writing. In plenary session there was also some reproach to Vidal-Quadras for his intervention.
How were the conversations up to the joint presentation of the law? The versions between two of the main actors -ERC and PSC- differ. They agree, yes, that originally the two parties devised to take it to the plenary session. Jaume Rodri, then a Republican deputy, told La Vanguardia that his group had already presented the proposal, when the socialist spokesman, Higini Clotas, asked him to withdraw it as "a favor." He assures that Oriol Martorell -PSC parliamentarian and renowned musician- had "threatened" his formation to abandon it if he was not the one who took the initiative. Also according to Rodri, the Socialists promised to quote him in his speech. Ultimately, it was not.
In conversation with La Vanguardia, Clotas does not confirm any of these issues, although he acknowledges that Esquerra had the idea in the first instance, but he points out that at the same time as his party. It was there when, according to the former Socialist deputy, they agreed to make a joint law. Clotas claims, however, the label of the musician Oriol Martorell (who died in 1996) in the proposal.
At the beginning of the debate, as stated in the minutes of the session, Clotas asked that the first to intervene be Martorell. Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, president of ERC in Parliament, accepted the request, acknowledging that the "origin" lay partly with the PSC, but also with Esquerra. It is this response from the former Republican leader that Clotas uses to demonstrate Martorell's authorship of the law. What happened did not sit well with Jaume Rodri, as he himself expressed to this newspaper.
Beyond the intricacies of the previous weeks and that same day, this point of the plenary session was debated relatively briefly and with a broad consensus. Most of the participants agreed that designating Els Segadors as an anthem meant strengthening the process of increasing self-government and “national affirmation”. That session gave "satisfaction" to the deputies in Parliament, as described by Higini Clotas, due to the historical significance of said act.
The vote left a final photograph that already corresponds to another era. A Catalan symbol unanimously obtained the support of the chamber, a fact that contrasts with the current configuration of Parliament, which makes an absolute consensus in this area unthinkable. The correlation of forces before and now and the evolution of one and the other confirm that times have changed.
