Despite the fast-moving, wildly unpredictable and frequently improbable turns Spanish politics has taken of late, very few pundits could have predicted the scenes that played out in Belgium on Thursday.
A little after 2pm, a 60-year-old Catalan politician and fugitive from Spanish justice addressed a packed conference at the Brussels press club. As reporters brimmed with questions that would go unanswered, Carles Puigdemont appeared to be relishing his moment.
“We are entering an unprecedented stage that must be explored and made use of,” he said. His words were hardly an understatement.
Thursday’s deal – in which Puigdemont’s separatist, centre-right Junts party agreed to support Spain’s socialists back into government in return for an amnesty for those who had taken part in the failed push for Catalan independence that he himself had masterminded – was historic.
The pact, unthinkable even six months ago, marks a new act in Puigdemont’s political career, bringing him from peripheral self-exile to one of the unlikeliest kingmakers in Spanish politics.
Although Puigdemont, a former journalist, remains one of the many and assorted bêtes noires of the Spanish right because of his role as the architect of the illegal and unilateral referendum of October 2017, his political star had appeared to be waning.
After fleeing Spain six years ago to avoid arrest for his role in the botched secession, leaving others in his cabinet to face trial and imprisonment, he reinvented himself in the small Belgian town of Waterloo as an MEP and the leader of what he termed a Catalan “government in exile”. Others, less charitably, had viewed him as an “operetta nationalist” and a spent, diminished figure.
Quim Torra, who succeeded Puigdemont as Catalan president, failed to attract the devotion his predecessor had inspired, and was ridiculed for saying that Catalonia was suffering “a humanitarian crisis”.
Torra’s previous, vehemently anti-Spanish tweets also came back to haunt him. A few years earlier, Torra had suggested that “Spaniards know only how to plunder”, claimed that Catalonia had been under Spanish occupation since 1714 and said Spaniards had long since removed the word “shame” from the dictionary. He later apologised “if anyone was offended by the tweets”.
With Puigdemont abroad and his former vice-president, Oriol Junqueras, jailed for his part in the secessionist gamble, ever wider cracks began to appear in the Catalan independence movement. Puigdemont’s Junts wanted a hardline, high-stakes continuation of his earlier strategy, while Junqueras’s more pragmatic Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) party favoured a longer-term and less confrontational approach to securing regional independence.
By October last year, the two parties were at such loggerheads that Junts abandoned the regional coalition government, leaving the region in the minority hands of the ERC. Little by little, the once united independence movement began to sputter and stall.
Neither were the efforts of some within the movement to carry on demonising the Spanish state helped when Pedro Sánchez became prime minister in 2018. Unlike his conservative predecessors – who had baited the Catalan independence movement, ignored it as it reached critical mass and then sent in the police to use force to stop people voting in the 2017 referendum – the socialist leader proffered carrots rather than sticks.
His softly-softly approach, aimed at healing the fractures within Catalan society and in the region’s relationship with the rest of Spain, yielded dividends, as did his controversial decision to pardon Junqueras and eight other separatist leaders in the interests of “coexistence and harmony”. The Catalan branch of the socialist party finished first in the Catalan regional election held in February 2021, even though Junts and the ERC went on to form a government.
But it was only after finishing second in July’s inconclusive general election – and sitting down to do the electoral maths – that Sánchez showed precisely how placatory he was prepared to be in return for winning the support he needed from the ERC and Junts.
The question now is whether Sánchez’s latest gamble will pay off – and how long Puigdemont’s newly acquired sense of political flexibility will last. The Spanish right, and some socialist voters, are unlikely to forgive Sánchez for what they see as a cynical and self-serving deal with the devil. The ERC is also probably less than thrilled to see the spotlight swinging back to Puigdemont and his uncompromising brand of politics.
But whatever exultation Puigdemont and others may be feeling at the prospect of the amnesty law today, the fact remains that neither Spain nor Catalonia are the places they were six years ago when the then regional president climbed into a car and fled abroad in secret.
When the push for independence plunged Spain into its worst political crisis in decades, a survey by the Catalan government’s Centre for Opinion Studies found 48.7% of Catalans supported independence while 43.6% did not. Another survey, conducted by the same centre in July this year, suggests a dramatic reversal of fortune, with 52% of Catalans opposed to independence and 42% in favour.
