The European Union is supporting Madrid’s imposition of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution to impose a puppet government in Catalonia. Giving Madrid a blank check to turn back the clock to the authoritarian policies of the fascist regime led by Francisco Franco, which fell in 1978 amid mass struggles of the Spanish working class, the EU is shattering whatever pretenses remain that it is a force for democracy.

As Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy prepares to dissolve the Catalan parliament, seize control of the regional state apparatus, beginning with the security services and the ministries, and purge the public service, the EU is fully backing him. Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) government, supported by Spain’s other bourgeois parties, has readied tens of thousands of Guardia Civil and soldiers to carry though its attack on Catalonia.

The workers of both Catalonia and the rest of Spain have been led into this perilous situation as a result of the treacherous right-wing policies of the supposed “left” of the bourgeois political establishment, the social democrats and Podemos, and the reactionary pro-capitalist and pro-European Union perspective of the Catalan nationalist parties. All of these parties have supported the brutal austerity policies imposed on workers across Spain since the 2008 financial crisis at the behest of the EU and the European and international banks.

Despite the sharp conflict between the Spanish bourgeoisie and its Catalan nationalist counterpart, they are united in their determination to make the working class pay for the crisis of Spanish and European capitalism.