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Students defend 1-O vote

Thousands of young people mobilised at the UAB to protest actions of Civil Guard; university students and teaching staff cut traffic along Diagonal

“Democracy” was the word on everyone’s lips at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) yesterday. Around 2,000 students gathered in the Civic Square under the slogan “Let’s not fail in democracy”, in a protest against the macro-operation that the Civil Guard carried out on Wednesday and in defence of being able to vote on October 1.

“When the only instrument that a State has is fear, repression and threat, it lost the battle long ago,” said former CUP MP David Fernández, adding that the Spanish State “knows that it is incapable of defeating the free will of the people under democratic conditions”. Both Fernández and the Podem al Parlament MP, Joan Giner, called for a general strike. “We have to start thinking about stopping the country against the coup,” Fernández called out to the crowds of students. Around a hundred young people later marched on the Vice-chancellor’s building to demand that activity at the university be stopped.

Comparisons between the Spanish government and the Franco regime were a repetitive theme at the gathering. The president of the Association of Municipalities for Independence (AMI) and mayor of Vilanova i la Geltrú, Neus Lloveras, called the actions of the Spanish government on Wednesday “nothing short of a coup d’etat”. “We have to show that the streets are ours in the face of a blind, deaf and dumb State that has caused there to be political prisoners in the 21st century,” Giner said.

The act, organised by the platform Universities for the Republic, ended with a warning to the central government through the rallying cry “We will fill the ballot boxes”.

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