The fugitive Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont has said he will return to Spain on Thursday, risking likely arrest in a move that could destabilise the country’s ruling coalition.
Puigdemont, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium for seven years after organising an illegal independence referendum in Catalonia, has said that he will be at the Catalan parliament in Barcelona on Thursday as it swears in the region’s new leader.
In a video message published Wednesday, he said that “in normal democratic conditions, for an MP like me to announce his intention to attend that session would be unnecessary, it would be irrelevant. But ours are not normal democratic conditions.
“There are two members, former regional minister Lluís Puig and myself, who cannot attend freely. This challenge must be answered and confronted.”
In May, Spain’s parliament approved a divisive amnesty law that the country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, offered Catalan separatists in return for helping him back to power. 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.
“That I can attend the [Catalan] parliament should be normal,” Puigdemont said in his video message. “That to do so risks an arrest that would be arbitrary and illegal is evidence of the democratic anomaly that we have the duty to denounce and fight, not because we are pro-independence, but because we are democrats.”
Police have reportedly been tasked with ensuring Puigdemont does not enter the Catalan parliament, limiting access to the area, carrying out room-by-room inspections and even searching the sewers.
“These are standard security procedures that are carried out before any investiture ceremony,” a spokesperson for the Catalan force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, told Politico.
In the recent Catalan regional elections, the socialists won the most seats but failed to attain an overall majority.
The moderate pro-independence Catalan Republican Left party (ERC), the longstanding rival to Puigdemont’s Junts per Catalunya, reached an agreement for the socialist former health minister Salvador Illa to be sworn in as the regional president. He will lead the first non-nationalist Catalan government in more than 20 years in a sign of the weakening of the independence movement since its heyday in 2017.
Puigdemont says it is his duty as former president in exile to attend the investiture and claimed in an open letter that if he is arrested ERC must take some of the blame. ERC has retorted that it is the judicial system, not them, that will be responsible for his arrest.
His allies have argued that the trip to Spain is a necessity.
“Puigdemont comes back to Catalonia after seven years in exile. And does so for the same reason that he left: to prove that Spain’s rule of law has failed when it comes to the pro-independence movement and Catalonia,” said Aleix Sarri, Junts’ secretary for international affairs and a former adviser to Puigdemont.
“Jailing him despite the amnesty law would mean that the Catalan pro-independence movement is just treated by the Spanish judiciary as an internal enemy to be repressed. If not even a pact for an amnesty law can be complied with, nothing will, and his detention and jailing would make the case for independence more obvious than ever.”
But many see Puigdemont’s move as a last throw of the dice for the separatist leader, who so far has shown little appetite for martyrdom, as most of the independence movement has concluded that his policy of el choque de trenes or train crash confrontation with the Spanish government is at a dead end.
The acting Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, has said that even if the investiture is delayed, it will still go ahead.
Puigdemont’s arrival and likely arrest could create a headache for the Sánchez government. The conservative People’s party (PP) came first in last year’s snap general election but failed to win sufficient support to form a new government.
That allowed Sánchez’s socialist party to try to bring together votes, which could only do by giving the amnesty as a concession to Catalan political parties. But the move has been highly controversial, sparking demonstrations across the country.
Lola García, the deputy editor of the Catalan daily La Vanguardia – a paper that is historically close to Puigdemont’s party – has noted that his arrival could have broader implications for Spain’s politics.
“The possibility of Puigdemont being jailed might complicate things for the Spanish government, although a change of government wouldn’t be in his interest at this juncture,” she said. “But it won’t resuscitate the unity of the independence movement nor the independence process.”
Despite a formal separation of powers, the Spanish judiciary is viewed – not only by Catalan separatists – as highly politicised and an unreformed relic of the Franco dictatorship.
