Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s political chickens are coming home to roost. The PM is supporting Salvador Illa, a member of his Socialist Party, to be invested as Catalan president on Thursday. However, this has angered exiled Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont, who has vowed to return to Spain to participate in Thursday’s investiture debate despite facing arrest upon arrival.
Former Catalan President Puigdemont led an illegal independence referendum in 2017 and subsequently fled to Belgium to avoid arrest by Spanish police. In exile, he remained the head of his party, Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), and was the party’s presidential candidate in the recent regional elections. Spain’s Supreme Court recently denied him amnesty, and an arrest order for him remains in place.
Puigdemont’s party lent crucial support to Sánchez in the Spanish parliament so that he could form a national government despite coming second in the general election. But in Catalonia, Sánchez’s Socialist party has tried to forge an alliance with Puigdemont’s rivals, the far-left Catalan separatist party Esquerra Republicana (ERC), to form a regional government. That government would be headed by Socialist Salvador Illa—a man whom Puigdemont has called a “Spanish nationalist” and accused of lacking Catalan sensitivity.
Puigdemont’s Junts party has made it clear that if their leader is arrested this week, they will consider the national-level agreement with Sánchez’s Socialist party to be over, leaving his government at risk of being toppled in a no-confidence vote.
“Evidently the agreement will have to be reconsidered and all scenarios will have to be studied,” said Jordi Turull, general secretary of Junts, in an interview on Spanish television.
On Wednesday, August 7th, the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan regional police force, were searching sewers as well as sealing a door that connects the regional parliamentary building with the Barcelona zoo in an operation to stop Puigdemont sneaking in before any investiture ceremony. The force has also deployed 165 officers to arrest Puigdemont before he can reach Parliament.
May’s elections in Catalonia resulted in a hung parliament. This raised the question of how Sánchez would resolve the situation to satisfy the various Catalan factions whose support his national government relies on.
The seven Junts members of the national parliament were essential for Sánchez to form a government last November, and their support was garnered only after several meetings in Belgium between Sánchez’s Socialist Party and Puigdemont himself.
