He remains, for many Spaniards, public enemy number one, but he now holds the key to the next government. The former president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the government of the autonomous community), Carles Puigdemont, has returned to the forefront of the political scene following the general elections on 23rd July.
His party, Junts Per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), won 7 seats out of 350 in Parliament. Enough to block a possible left-wing government, if it decided to combine its votes with those of the Popular Party (PP, right) and Vox (extreme right) against the inauguration of the president of the government, the socialist Pedro Sanchez (Parti Spanish socialist worker, PSOE), which wishes to re-edit the current coalition of the lefts in power.
Worse, since the vote of Spaniards abroad was counted on July 28 – giving one more seat to the PP at the expense of the PSOE – even his abstention would no longer be enough to give power to Pedro Sanchez. The next Spanish government thus depends on the approval of the man who orchestrated the Catalan secession attempt of October 2017. If the new Parliament is due to take office on August 17, subsequent negotiations to form a majority promise to be long. And there is no guarantee that they will succeed.
Disobedience and embezzlement
Carles Puigdemont is still being prosecuted for the organization of the banned referendum of 1er October 2017 and targeted by two counts: disobedience, for having ignored the warnings of justice, and aggravated embezzlement, an offense punishable by twelve years in prison, for having allegedly used public funds to organize this referendum. Settled in Belgium after having fled the day after the unilateral declaration of independence, on October 27, 2017, then became a European deputy in 2019, the sexagenarian has so far managed to escape Spanish justice.
His situation, however, is more delicate than ever. He lost several appeals to the Court of Justice of the European Union to retain the immunity of MEP which was lifted in March 2021 by his peers, in Brussels. He announced that he wanted to make a final appeal, the decision of which will be made in eight months at the latest. By then, there is little doubt that the judge of the Spanish Supreme Court Pablo Llarena will have reactivated the European arrest warrant issued against him, which Belgium refuses to apply.
For now, the MP is wandering around the Belgian capital. His cause fell into oblivion. But from his plush 550-square-meter pavilion in Waterloo, south of the city, the former mayor of Girona under the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia label, a nationalist right-wing party, has consistently dictated the uncompromising line of Junts, the separatist formation he founded in 2020.
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