BARCELONA — “Now what?”
This is what people on the streets here were asking after more than 2 million Catalans voted overwhelmingly Sunday in a chaotic, violent referendum to declare independence from Spain.
The mood was not jubilation. It was anxiety.
On Monday, secessionist leaders prepared to present the results to Catalonia’s regional parliament, which has vowed to move forward with the creation of an independent republic.
But nervous European leaders, who watched the chaos and violence explode on Sunday, warned the region in northeastern Spain to pause.
The European Union saw the referendum as a violation of the Spanish constitution and privately worried about other secessionist movements in Europe.
The lopsided vote Sunday is sure to be vigorously challenged in the Spanish courts, which have already declared the vote illegal. The central government in Madrid has described the referendum and its results as illegitimate.
There was no sign of contrition from Madrid on Monday that its National Police and Guardia Civil militia had gone too far in trying to stop the vote, despite scenes of officers clad in riot gear firing rubber bullets, whipping citizens at polling stations with rubber batons and dragging some, including women, away by their hair.
Just the opposite. Spanish authorities generally commended the police. The Spanish interior minister conceded that some of the violence looked “unpleasant,” but the response by riot police was “proportionate,” he said.
According to the Catalan government, which announced the results early Monday, 90 percent of the ballots cast were for independence — with 2,020,144 people voting yes and 176,566 no.
Turnout was low — just 42 percent. More than 2.2 million people were reported to have cast ballots, Catalan authorities said, out of 5.3 million registered voters.
Many people in Catalonia who opposed independence said they would not vote in the referendum, which they denounced as a sham.
Spanish Justice Minister Rafael Catal? warned Monday that any declaration of independence could cause the central government to invoke Article 155 of the country’s constitution, which allows Madrid to intervene in the running of an autonomous region.
Catalonia, which has its own language and culture, already enjoys broad autonomy, with its own parliament and police, as well as control over education, health care and media.
Carles Puigdemont, the regional president and a leading secessionist, said that Catalonia had won “the right to independence.”
He called on Europe to support its split from Spain and “not look the other way.”
But European leaders were keeping their distance.
In Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker reiterated that Catalan autonomy “is an internal matter for Spain that has to be dealt with in line with the constitutional order of Spain.”
Sunday’s vote “was not legal,” Juncker said.
Juncker suggested that any territory leaving Spain “would find itself outside of the European Union.”
