I don't know if you have spent much time in Spain, but they have a tendency to be pretty heavy handed even when they don't need to be. It is a large contributor

I don't know if you have spent much time in Spain, but they have a tendency to be pretty heavy handed even when they don't need to be. It is a large contributor to the Basque separatist movement for example. I am still waiting to get better numbers on how many people voted etc. since the reports are wildly disparate, but I wouldn't be surprised if the move was more to send a message to other separatist movements than to deal with today in itself. Regardless, I think the bigger take away from these events is that they have made their bed and now must lay in it. Almost any result of this vote could have been more easily dealt with in almost any other way they could imagine.