Pro-independence politician sets high price as acting PM Pedro Sánchez explores coalition pacts
Spain’s acting prime minister Pedro Sánchez must end all legal action against Catalan separatists to secure another term in office, said the region’s fugitive pro-independence leader whose support the premier needs to govern.
Carles Puigdemont, founder of the Together for Catalonia party, set a high price for his party’s seven votes, which Sánchez needs to reach a majority in Spain’s parliament after an inconclusive July general election.
In a speech on Tuesday in Brussels, he demanded an amnesty and the “complete and effective abandonment of judicial action against independence”. Puigdemont faces the prospect of arrest if he returns to Spain and hundreds of others are in legal proceedings over a 2017 push for independence.
The opposition People’s party quickly denounced the idea of an amnesty as “offensive”.
Spain is being run by a caretaker government led by Sánchez while his Socialist party negotiates possible parliamentary pacts with five small regional and separatist parties. The prime minister has been accused of shameless political expediency by the conservative PP, which won the most votes in the July election but does not have a clear path to a majority.
Together for Catalonia, known in Catalan simply as Junts, is the prime minister’s most difficult potential partner. Puigdemont was the driving force behind a 2017 referendum on Catalan independence that was ruled illegal by judges and triggered the worst national crisis since Spain’s return to democracy.
Puigdemont, who was the autonomous region’s president at the time and has been the target of a Spanish arrest warrant, said an amnesty law was “within reach” of the Spanish parliament.
“Abandoning the repression of the democratic independence movement is an ethical requirement,” he said.
But he added that his past dealings with Sánchez meant that Together, the most radical of Catalonia’s separatist parties, had little trust in the government. As a result it also demanded new mechanisms to “verify and guarantee” the implementation of future accords.
Making clear negotiations would not be easy, Puigdemont said: “We have not endured all these years just to save a legislature.”
Any amnesty deal would heap new criticism on Sánchez. He is already vilified on the right for depending in his first term on the votes of other parties that want to break up Spain, including one descended from the political wing of the disbanded Basque terrorist group Eta.
Responding to Puigdemont, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo said an amnesty “is not compatible with the constitution and is offensive to Spanish democracy”.
The PP will have a first shot at forming a government later this month but it is expected to fail as it does not have enough votes. Sánchez will then have his chance in October or November. If he falls short, Spain will have to hold repeat elections early next year, as it did in 2015-16 and 2019.
Puigdemont was speaking the day after his first meeting with a Spanish government minister since he fled the country in late 2017. On Monday, he held “fruitful” talks with Yolanda Díaz, a deputy prime minister, in which both sides agreed to “explore all democratic solutions to unblock the political conflict” in Catalonia.
Allies of Sánchez insisted that Díaz met Puigdemont not as a government representative but as leader of her leftwing party, Sumar, which would join a coalition with the Socialists. They also said the prime minister only learnt about the meeting the day before, a claim questioned by Feijóo.
