Catalan police have launched an operation to find and arrest Carles Puigdemont and set up roadblocks on routes to the French border after the fugitive former regional president returned to Spain for the first time in seven years to address a crowd of several thousand in Barcelona and then disappeared.
The driver of the car in which he escaped – an officer in the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police – was arrested amid serious questions for the force, which was at the rally in strength, as traffic in Barcelona was brought to a standstill in the search for the former president.
Mr Puigdemont, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Belgium after organising an illegal independence referendum in Catalonia, had declared earlier this week he would be at the Catalan parliament in Barcelona on Thursday as it swore in the region’s new leader.
Speaking on a stage at the Arc de Triomf, symbolically close to the law courts and the Catalan parliament, he told the crowd of mainly older supporters: “I’ve come here today to remind you that we’re still here. We don’t have the right to give in, the right to self-determination belongs to the people. Catalonia must be allowed to decide its future.
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“I don’t know when I’ll see you again but, whatever happens, when we see each other again we can once again shout out Viva! Free Catalonia!”
Mr Puigdemont was then whisked away, surrounded by members of his Together for Catalonia party, apparently in the direction of the parliament building. However, when the group arrived at parliament, he was not among them.
Details emerged of how Mr Puigdemont managed to get to the stage, and then escape, despite the presence of about 300 uniformed and plainclothes police officers. A crowd of a couple of dozen people was used to shield him from view as he walked from the narrow Passage de Sant Benet to the Arc de Triomf; once his speech was over, the crowd again shielded him as he reached a hidden screen and entered a waiting car.
Unconfirmed reports on Catalan radio said Mr Puigdemont had made a pact with the police that if officers allowed him to speak at the Arc de Triomf, he would then surrender to them.
Meanwhile, an hour after the ex-president’s appearance and escape, the investiture of the new Catalan president, Salvador Illa, began. Mr Illa, a socialist and former health minister in the Madrid government, won the most seats in last month’s regional election but failed to gain an overall majority.
Pro-independence parties have previously been able to put together an alliance to keep the socialists from power but lacked the support this time, however. Their options were to accept a socialist-led government, led by Illa, or go to the polls again, an option that was in no one’s interest.
Mr Puigdemont’s party, which came second in the election, refused to support Mr Illa’s candidacy but he won the support of the rival separatist Republican Left party in exchange for offering Catalonia greater fiscal autonomy.
If part of the aim of the Puigdemont escapade was to overshadow Illa’s investiture, it succeeded. But the latter’s coming to power meant that for the first time in 20 years, Catalonia will have a regional government for which social issues, rather than sovereignty, are top of the agenda.
At the investiture, Mr Illa praised his predecessor, Pere Aragonès, saying he had left Catalonia in better shape than he had found it. Adding that his preferred associates were Aragonès’ Republican Left party and the left-wing Catalunya en Comú, he said: “I have come here to construct, not to dismantle, and to make the most of my predecessor’s achievements.”
Mr Puigdemont fled to Belgium in October 2017 in the boot of a car to evade arrest for his part in the failed and illegal declaration of Catalan independence. Nine members of his government received jail sentences of up to 13 years for their part in the independence push and all were pardoned three years later in 2021.
A divisive amnesty law for those involved in the symbolic independence referendum in November 2014 and the illegal unilateral poll that followed three years later was passed by the Spanish parliament in May as Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, struck a deal with Catalan separatist MPs to help him return to power. However, Spain’s supreme court upheld arrest warrants for Mr Puigdemont and others who were charged with misuse of public funds, ruling that the amnesty law did not apply to them. Mr Puigdemont insists the vote was not illegal and that the charges linked to it therefore have no basis.
The Spanish government has not commented on Puigdemont’s reappearance and vanishing act, but the conservative People’s party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said Thursday’s events were “an unbearable humiliation”.
“It’s painful to watch this madness live – a madness for which Pedro Sánchez is chiefly responsible. Damaging Spain’s image like this is unforgivable,” he said.
The far-right Vox party’s Santiago Abascal described the events as “the destruction of the state beamed live on Spanish television”.
Like so much in Catalan politics, Puigdemont’s dramatic reappearance was symbolic and in many ways an act of desperation, as the movement he led is divided and in disarray, and support for independence is at its lowest in 15 years. By refusing to support Illa’s investiture, his party has parked itself in the margins of Catalan politics, leaving its arch-rival, the Republican Left, to become the leading voice of Catalan nationalism.
Mr Puigdemont came to rally the troops but his forces are older and the average age of the crowd that gathered to greet him on Thursday was well above 60. Far from being a new beginning, the prevailing mood at the event was one of ecstatic nostalgia. – Guardian