The pro-independence leader had announced several times that he intended to participate in the investiture debate of the president of Catalonia, after seven years spent abroad to escape the pursuit of him in Spain. He returned on the day of the vote, gave a speech on the podium a stone's throw from Parliament, but in the end he did not go there and quietly escaped, eluding the police.
“We can imagine that he wanted to exert maximum pressure to prevent the inauguration of Salvador Illa,” the Socialist candidate who became the first president of the regional government not from the nationalist ranks since 2010, estimates political scientist Pablo Simon.
“His surprise arrival could sow disorder, give rise to demonstrations, postpone the plenary session and prevent the inauguration,” the analyst continues. “It was his last chance to prevent the appointment and put pressure on the ERC,” the separatist left-wing party that has so far led the region.
A direct competitor to Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), Carles Puigdemont's party in the independence movement, the ERC ultimately chose to back Salvador Illa for his election – not without negotiating a deal that would provide new powers to the regional government.
What consequences for Spain and Catalonia?
“The Spanish state is being ridiculed. Puigdemont seems to be the smartest, and the image of Spain on the international stage is that of a humiliated police force”, Pablo Simon believes. National daily El Pais on Saturday lamented the “incompetence” of the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan police, which “reawakened old fears of the politicization of the police establishment, fears all the more fueled by the three people arrested for their alleged involvement. in this escape they are precisely agents of this police force.” Three Mossos were actually arrested, accused of helping the independence leader to escape, still subject to an arrest warrant for his role in Catalonia's attempted secession in 2017. “From this flight only Mossos remain able shock, anger. of the Supreme Court (whose judge is investigating the case against Carles Puigdemont) and Junts who is isolated,” summarizes the Catalan daily La Vanguardia.
Can Pedro Sanchez be put in trouble?
Officially on vacation, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez did not comment on the return of Carles Puigdemont. The government, with a very fragile majority, is supported in Parliament by Junts, who had negotiated an amnesty law in exchange for his support, which Carles Puigdemont still does not benefit from for all the facts he is accused of.
His Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, on Friday placed the responsibility for Thursday's fiasco on the Mossos, “competent to guarantee both the normal conduct of the impeachment debate and the application of arrest warrants.” But this “international humiliation” will bring, according to Pablo Simon, the death of the opposition who will see it as “an affront prepared by the government itself in order not to arrest Carles Puigdemont”.
And in fact, on the right and far right, the opponents of Pedro Sanchez's government did not mince their words. “The prime minister, the interior minister and the director of intelligence would have resigned in shame in any country with an ounce of rule of law,” Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right party Vox, wrote of X, criticizing a government. “not incompetent, but complicit”.