A potentially violent showdown looms in Spain on Sunday, where tens of thousands of Catalans intend to carry out an independence referendum deemed unconstitutional by the country’s courts.
Hundreds of independence supporters slept overnight on Friday and Saturday in some 160 schools that are designated polling places, vowing to keep them open for voters.
But local police planned to remove them on Sunday — by force if necessary, Spanish government sources told Reuters.
Catalan officials have said polls will open at 9 a.m. The Madrid government has ordered separatists to vacate the schools by 6 a.m.
And while both sides were urging non-violence on Saturday, thousands of national police billeted in two ships off Barcelona were ready to halt voting.
“We trust that citizens understand and will follow those instructions” to leave school polling stations, said Enric Millo, the region’s top Spanish government official.
Carles Puigdemont, the pro-separatist president of the wealthy region in northeast Spain, is undaunted. Catalonia has a right to decide its own future, he told separatists.
“Friends,” he said, “so that victory is definite, on Sunday let’s dress up in referendum [clothes] and leave home prepared to change history.”
He called on the European Union to step in and help mediate talks between Madrid and Barcelona.
For weeks, Catalonia and the rest of Spain have played a cat-and-mouse game over the referendum.
Spanish officials have shut down Web sites telling Catalans where to vote.
Catalans responded by launching an application on Google that gives potential voters polling locations and instructions. Spanish officials then won a court order forcing Google to delete the app, The Wall Street Journal said.
Early Saturday, the Catalan regional government’s telecommunications and information center was raided by officers.
The raid set out to stop the use of vote-counting software necessary to Sunday’s election, Joan Maria Pique, Catalonia’s spokesman, told CNN.
“It’s one more sign of the unreasonableness on the part of the state trying to repress,” a different Catalan spokesman said, according to the Journal.
He added that the referendum is “ unstoppable.”
If a vote is still held, it will likely be steeply in favor of independence, since Catalans who are opposed to succession from Spain have vowed to boycott the referendum.
Spanish unionists note that Catalonia, a region of 7.5 million, has a high degree of autonomy — as do other regions, like the Basque region in the country’s northeast and the Galicia region in the west.