Catalan police have launched an operation to find and arrest Carles Puigdemont after the fugitive former regional president returned to Spain for the first time in seven years to address a crowd of several thousand in Barcelona before disappearing again.
Speaking on a stage at the Arc de Triomf, symbolically close to the law courts and the Catalan parliament, he told the crowd of mainly older supporters: “I’ve come here today to remind you that we’re still here. We don’t have the right to give in, the right to self-determination belongs to the people. Catalonia must be allowed to decide its future.
“I don’t know when I’ll see you again but, whatever happens, when we see each other again we can once again shout out Viva! Free Catalonia!”
Puigdemont was then whisked away, surrounded by members of his Together for Catalonia party, in the direction of the parliament building. However, when the group arrived at parliament, he was not among them.
Catalan police are stopping and searching vehicles heading towards the French border and there are traffic controls around the city centre following reports that Puigdemont was seen leaving in a car.
Puigdemont, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium for seven years after organising an illegal independence referendum in Catalonia, had declared this week he would be at the Catalan parliament in Barcelona on Thursday as it swore in the region’s new leader.
Meanwhile, an hour after the ex-president’s dramatic appearance, the investiture of the new Catalan president, Salvador Illa, began. Illa, a socialist and former health minister in the Madrid government, won the most seats in last month’s regional election but failed to gain an overall majority.
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Pro-independence parties have previously been able to put together an alliance to keep the socialists from power but lacked the support this time, however. Their options were to accept a socialist-led government, led by Illa, or go to the polls again, an option that was in no one’s interest.
Puigdemont’s party, which came second in the election, refused to support Illa’s candidacy but he won the support of the rival separatist Republican Left party in exchange for offering Catalonia greater fiscal autonomy.
Puigdemont fled to Belgium in October 2017 in the boot of a car to evade arrest for his part in the failed and illegal declaration of independence. Nine members of his government received jail sentences of up to 13 years for their part in the independence push and all were pardoned three years later in 2021.
A divisive amnesty law that the country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, offered Catalan separatists in return for helping him back to power was then approved by the Spanish parliament in May. The law applies to about 400 people involved in a symbolic independence referendum in November 2014 and the illegal unilateral poll that followed three years later but in July, Spain’s supreme court upheld arrest warrants for Puigdemont and others who are charged with misuse of public funds, ruling that the amnesty law did not apply to them.
Like so much in Catalan politics, Puigdemont’s dramatic reappearance was symbolic and in many ways an act of desperation, as the movement he led is divided and in disarray, and support for independence is at its lowest in 15 years. By refusing to support Illa’s investiture, his party has parked itself in the margins of Catalan politics, leaving its arch-rival, the Republican Left, to become the leading voice of Catalan nationalism.
Puigdemont came to rally the troops but his forces are older and the average age of the crowd gathered to greet him here today was well above 60. Far from being a new beginning, the prevailing mood at today’s event was one of ecstatic nostalgia.