Blocked streets, burning cars, and shocking scenes of police violence. In recent days, images of clashes in Catalonia have circulated around the world, as hundreds of thousands of people have protested the jailing of pro-independence leaders. The trigger came last Monday, when the Spanish courts sentenced the organizers of the unofficial 2017 independence referendum to prison spells of up to thirteen years. Over the last week, actions from the 25,000-strong occupation of El Prat airport to Friday’s general strike have gripped Catalonia — facing repression from not just the Spanish police, but also the forces of the Catalan regional government.

This may seem surprising given that Catalonia is ruled by pro-independence parties — the center-right JuntsXCat, led by exiled former president Carles Puigdemont, and the center-left Esquerra Republicana, led by former vice president Oriol Junqueras, today starting a thirteen-year prison sentence for “sedition.” Yet these forces are themselves anything but militant: indeed, when Madrid blocked the 2017 referendum, they each counted on the European Union coming to their aid by brokering a democratic resolution to the conflict. These naïve hopes were soon crushed, as Brussels turned its back on them; today, these parties have backed away from any sharp confrontation, and have sought to restrain the angriest protests.

The force that identifies rather more with the demonstrations is the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP), an anti-capitalist movement created in 2012. Emphasizing local democracy and the call for a Catalan Republic, it has long refused to stand in elections to the Spanish Congress, even as it built up its representation in Catalonia itself. Yet with the Catalan question ever more central to Spanish politics, and a Spanish general election slated for November 10, this time the CUP has abandoned its abstentionist line. As one candidate Eulàlia Reguant put it in a radio interview, “no CUP activist wants to stand for the Madrid parliament, but the political moment calls for an intervention by the pro-independence left.”