Spain said yesterday it will move to dismiss Catalonia's separatist government and call fresh elections in the region in a bid to stop its leaders from declaring independence, reports AFP from Madrid. Speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said his government had no choice after the administration of Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont acted in a way that was "unilateral, contrary to the law and seeking confrontation" in holding a banned independence referendum in the northeastern region.
A spokesman for Puigdemont's government said he would respond at 9.00pm (1900 GMT). Taking Spain into uncharted legal waters by using Article 155 of the constitution, which allows Madrid to wrest back control of rebellious regions, Rajoy said he was asking the Senate to give him permission to dissolve the Catalan parliament and "call elections within a maximum of six months".
He is also requesting that all of Puigdemont's government be stripped of their functions, which "in principle will be carried out by (national) ministers for the duration of this exceptional situation."
The national Senate will now have to agree to these unprecedented steps -- a process that will take about a week.
Rajoy's conservative Popular Party holds a majority in the Senate, and the measures also enjoy the support of the main opposition Socialists and centrist Ciudadanos party.
If the Senate greenlights the proposals, the Catalan parliament will continue to operate as normal until it is dissolved, but it will be unable to elect a new government chief to replace Puigdemont or vote on any laws that go against Spain's constitution and its statute as a semi-autonomous region.
Catalonia sparked Spain's worst political crisis in decades with the chaotic referendum on October 1, which Puigdemont said resulted in a 90 percent vote in favour of breaking away from Spain.
But turnout was given as 43 percent as many anti-independence Catalans stayed away from the vote, which had been ruled illegal by the Constitutional Court, while others were hindered from voting by a police crackdown.
Earlier yesterday, the website of Spain's Constitutional Court -- which ruled the independence referendum in Catalonia illegal -- was forced down following threats from cyber-activists, as Madrid prepared to seize powers from the region over its independence threat.
A court spokeswoman said access to its website had been blocked since Saturday morning. "The site is not accessible due to an overload,” she told AFP, in what appeared to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, when hackers make a website unavailable by flooding it with traffic.
Hackers from the loose-knit collective Anonymous — which has targeted a string of high-profile targets around the world in recent years — had threatened cyber attacks over the Catalan crisis, but the spokeswoman stressed that the source of Saturday’s hacking was unknown.
“We are aware of the announcement from Anonymous but we do not know the origin of the attack,” she said.
The rest of the court’s IT systems have been unaffected, she added. Spain’s National Security Department (DSN), which is part of the prime minister’s office, warned on its website late Friday that Anonymous-linked Twitter accounts had announced a wide-scale cyberattack campaign for Saturday under the hashtags #OpCatalunya and #FreeCatalunya.