fahrenheit451:210

It is five weeks now since  the question of independence from the Spanish State was put to the people of Catalonia in a referendum.
That exercise was deemed by the Constitutional Court, sitting in Madrid, to be ultra vires vis a vis the Spanish Federal Constitution.Consequently they invoked Article 155 and effectively sacked the Catalan regional administration en bloc.
Were it have been so simple as they had imagined it would be; alas not.
Some of the pro-independence Catalan leadership relocated to Brussels whilst some others were apprehended and taken into Spanish legal custody in whose gaol they now languish.
The late great Dario Fo would no doubt have revelled in the absurdity of it all and have composed  The Accidental Death of the Spanish State.
Clearly,the tenuous post-Francoist constitutional legitimacy of the Iberian regime has been cast into doubt.
Monday ,6 November has news reports from Belgium that a Judge,in the wake of the authorities there having received a request under a European Arrest Warrant for their extradition ,has released Puigdemont and his tiny band of confederates on what amounts to own their own recognizance.They are due to appear in a fortnight's time at an extradition hearing to be held in Brussels.
All of which is making an even bigger diplomatic/political pig's ear out of what is already Spanish premier Rajoy's commedia dell'arte handling of what might otherwise have been a rational,circumspect and consensual dialogue over the possibility of Catalonia's aspirations for independence.
Instead  "Europe " aka the moribund and decrepit system of Supranational Teutonic State Vassalage aka the EU is in the middle of a Merde tsunami,where all the leading european state actors are madly pretending that it isn't even happening and if it were it's something they're not going to get all het up about.
So much then for the Rule of Law ,transparency,accountability,democratic institutions, the internal affairs of supposed sovereign national states etc.etc. It is all otiose cant where even the actors have stopped pretending to adhere to the agreed script.

There is something rotten in the heart of Brussels.