This video is a political and historical denunciation that challenges the official narrative about the democratic legitimacy of the Spanish State and the way spain interprets the October 1st, 2017 referendum in Catalonia.
The starting point is an inversion of language: labeling a referendum, an act of popular participation, as a coup d’état. The text argues that this use of the term is not innocent, but a strategy to delegitimize popular sovereignty and protect an existing political order.
From there, the video returns to the origins. It recalls that Spain’s current democracy was built through the so-called “exemplary Transition,” which is presented here as a mirage: a process based on silence, the lack of accountability for Francoist crimes, and pacts of impunity. Rather than a real break with the dictatorship, there was a disguised continuity.
King Juan Carlos I appears as a symbol of this democratic fiction. The video claims that his role during the attempted coup of February 23rd, 1981 was used as a theatrical performance to legitimize the monarchy as the guarantor of democracy. Today, in light of corruption scandals and his exile, that image is deeply undermined, reinforcing the argument that the regime’s moral legitimacy is fragile.
The text then goes further back, locating the roots of the Spanish political system in a real and undeniable coup d’état: the military uprising led by General Franco in 1936. By doing so, it draws a line of continuity between the fascist coup, the dictatorship, the Transition, and the current regime. The implicit message is that one cannot accuse a democratic movement of being a “coup” without first revisiting the foundations of the State itself.
The conclusion is a direct appeal: enough with rewriting history. The video calls for coherence and historical memory, and denounces the contradiction of condemning an act of voting while legitimizing a system born from a military coup and consolidated without a true democratic rupture.
In essence, the text does not only defend the Catalan referendum; it questions the moral and historical framework from which it is judged. Its core is not only Catalonia, but a broader critique of how power redefines concepts such as “democracy,” “legality,” and “coup d’état” in order to preserve itself.
