Gerard Melgar Barcelona
Barcelona
Updated Saturday, March 16, 2024-01:42
12-M Carles Puigdemont considers returning to Spain and being arrested
12-M Carles Puigdemont will say next week whether he will run for the Catalan elections and Junts warns that his candidacy "will internationalize the 'procés'"
Junts
wants to trust everything to the emotional factor.
That is,
Carles Puigdemont
.
The return to Catalonia of the former Catalan president, six and a half years after his flight to Belgium, to once again become the tenant of the main office of the Palau de la Generalitat is, without a doubt, the best letter of introduction for the
neo-convergents
in the face of the regional elections on
May 12
.
The advancement of the elections to midweek by
Pere Aragonès
, after seeing his
Budgets
rejected in
Parliament
, has caught several parties on the wrong foot.
JxCat
is one of the groups that had not yet chosen its headliner for an event that no one anticipated so soon and that could have arrived in February 2025. From the moment the current head of the Government announced the date of the call, and with the path clear for an Amnesty Law in force within two months, the Junts engine room and the former
president
himself play the card of his imminent return to be present at the investiture session that will take place in the Catalan chamber.
And, if it is as a candidate, Puigdemont himself will reveal it in the coming days.
Meanwhile, to magnify his legend in the martyrology of the independence movement, Puigdemont's entourage fuels speculation about what could happen to him once he crosses the border and sets foot on Spanish soil.
"He is willing to assume all the consequences," said his lawyer,
Gonzalo Boye
, yesterday in an interview on Rac1.
"Even to be arrested," specified the lawyer, who points to the end of May or the beginning of June as the range of possible dates for the MEP's return.
Also the general secretary of JxCat,
Jordi Turull
, suggests the possibility that there are judges who resist applying the measure of grace in the Puigdemont case: "If they are willing to prevaricate and commit an atrocity like arresting him, they will know."
The data of any demographic forecast that can be made of the Catalan women will depend on the name that occupies the first place on the
neoconvergent
list .
Empirical proof that there would be no better campaign for JxCat than to champion the return of the person who led the Government that organized
the 1-O referendum
is what happened in the elections that were held two months after that turbulent October 2017.
In those elections, called by the Government of
Mariano Rajoy
after the application of
article 155
of the Constitution, the return to Catalonia of Puigdemont, who had fled to Belgium after the proclamation of the
unilateral declaration of independence
, was the axis of the campaign of
Junts per Catalunya
, which at that time was not yet a party, but the platform that the former
president
created in the midst of a
convergent
refoundation in view of those regional elections.
The video of an advertisement in the middle of that campaign left no room for doubt.
Walking through the leaves of a forest, Puigdemont advanced towards an indeterminate place while a voice-over speech
concluded
: "For the
president
to return , we must vote for the
president
."
JxCat was in the midst of a final sprint in its goal of winning the December 21 elections or, at the very least, reversing the polls and placing itself above
Esquerra Republicana
.
The second thing happened because
Ciudadanos
won victory at the polls with 36 seats, but Junts obtained two more deputies than its rival in the nationalist camp (34 compared to 32 with barely 13,000 more votes), which was enough to once again constitute a Independence government led by the former
Convergència
.
False return
But the trip back to Barcelona ended up being one of those electoral promises suspended in time
sine die
.
Prolific in the use of social networks, Puigdemont continued to speculate in the days after those elections about his return home and, playing with confusion, he published images for a few days that suggested a way back.
He opened the enigma, at the beginning of 2018, a photograph of a road that leads to a police facility in the town of
Camprodon
, in the province of Girona, very close to the French border.
Photography published by Carles Puigdemont in January 2018.
The threat of what would have been a challenge to Justice even came the day before the investiture session that the Parliament had scheduled for January 30.
On the previous day, Puigdemont published a photograph of one of the streets adjacent to the Ciutadella park, where the Catalan Chamber is located, accompanied by a text about his candidacy for the presidency of the Generalitat: "For the country, for freedoms ", for our institutions, for democracy, for dignity, for the future and for you."
The mystery lasted a few hours because the session was finally suspended after the
Constitutional Court
had prohibited a remote election from Belgium.
Puigdemont, who became an MEP in 2019, once again led the Junts list in the 2021 regional elections, but only symbolically and leaving the
number two
,
Laura Borràs
, as the true candidate.
The result was adverse to that of 2017, ERC turned the score around and prevailed over the
neoconvergents
as the second most voted force after the
PSC
.
In this way, the former Catalan president will have waited at least until 2024, already with an
Amnesty Law
, to complete the promised return and travel the more than 1,300 kilometers that separate the
House of the Republic
, his residence on Avenue de l 'Avocat (Lawyer Avenue) of Waterloo, and Barcelona.