Thumbing the nose at the authorities or putting pressure on them as the tide turns in their favor? Catalan separatist Carles Puigdemont, exiled in Belgium for more than six years to flee Spanish justice, settled very close to the Spanish border, in the Vallespir valley in the Pyrénées-Orientales, sources within his party, Juntos per Catalunya (JxCat).
Carles Puigdemont, who announced on March 21 that he would be a candidate again in the regional elections on May 12 in Catalonia, intends to campaign from this region bordering Catalonia and considers this as a preliminary step to his return to Spain, specified the same sources. This will be the third time that he is running in regional elections in Catalonia since he left in exile in 2017.
Soon to be amnestied
The independence leader has never been able to occupy his seat due to the arrest warrant hanging over him since the aborted secession attempt of Catalonia in 2017, which he led as president of the region, and which had earned an arrest warrant from the Spanish courts, which is still in force. He said he would return to Spain if he had a chance of being elected president of Catalonia by the regional parliament.
The current Catalan president Pere Aragonès, leader of the independence Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) party, the great rival of Carles Puigdemont’s Together for Catalonia (JxCat) party, took everyone by surprise by announcing last week the holding of early elections to the Catalan Parliament on May 12. This announcement came on the eve of the adoption in Madrid by Spanish deputies of an amnesty law for separatists involved in the unilateral declaration of independence of Catalonia in 2017.