2023-10-27 21:26:36
Brussels”I guess you are clear that this is over. Our people have sacrificed us, at least me. You will be counselors (I hope and wish) but I am already sacrificed as you suggest [Joan] Late”. The message, from Carles Puigdemont to Toni Comín on January 31, 2018, denoted the mood of the exiled president after seeing his chance to be invested remotely in Parliament fading away. A “bad moment” that he quickly overcame – according to sources close to him – when Telecinco made public this and other messages recorded from the screen of Comín’s mobile phone, and that now a Belgian judge will investigate for violating the right to privacy of the current Junts MEP The star of the chain, Ana Rosa Quintana, and two other workers will be called to testify.
It had only been three months since independence had been declared – precisely on October 27 – and several Catalan leaders had gone into exile while others were already in prison or would end up there a few days later. That was probably a warning of how difficult it would be to do politics hundreds of kilometers from Catalonia, but six years later everything has taken an unexpected turn and Puigdemont heads the Junts negotiations for the possible investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The Spanish legislature is in their hands.
After the DUI, the main pro-independence leaders were spread between Belgium, Scotland and, a few months later, Switzerland, and the prisons of Estremera and Alcalá Meco, before the political prisoners were sent to Catalan penitentiaries. The decision to leave or stay tightened the rope even more between the different sensitivities of the Government, especially between Esquerra and Junts who, despite continuing to be partners for a few more years, ended up breaking.
The Council of the Republic, which aspired to be a kind of parallel government with the aim of internationalizing the political conflict between Catalonia and the State, was set up in March 2018 and already from the beginning it showed the tensions between the parties. One, ERC and CUP, have always despised it and the others, Junts, have been involved so thoroughly that for a time Puigdemont presided over both entities. He left the presidency of Junts to focus on the Council, but the negotiations with the PSOE have made him fully involved with the party again, to the point that the consultation on the investiture – with little participation, but overwhelming majority in favor of blocking it – will have no influence on the attitude of its president.
Judicial victories and defeats
MEPs since 2019 – but exercising since 2020 thanks to the ruling in favor of Oriol Junqueras by the Court of Justice of the EU -, Puigdemont, Comín and Clara Ponsatí have had a platform in recent years, despite gradually losing influence in politics Catalan Bye now.
Ponsatí, moreover, has distanced himself from the judicial strategy of exile, which initially had given some of the most symbolic victories, both with the rejection of the Euroorders in Belgium – with the case of former councilor Lluís Puig in the front – or the negatives to extradite Puigdemont from Germany in 2018 and from Italy in 2021. But the latest news that has arrived from the European Parliament, which has withdrawn his immunity, and from the General Court of the EU, which has accepted in apart from the theses of Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, they have not gone in the same direction.
The foci of exile have always been in Belgium, more specifically in the so-called House of the Republic in Waterloo, but they have also sometimes passed through Switzerland where the ERC general secretary, Marta Rovira, still lives today, and where installed for a while Anna Gabriel, the spokesperson of the CUP during the most tense moments of the Process. Gabriel and also Meritxell Serret have returned to Catalonia and should soon be tried for disobedience, just like Ponsatí. The amnesty would end these processes and also those of hundreds of other people still prosecuted for 1-O and for the protests that arose from the judge to the pro-independence leaders at the Supreme Court. And this, in large part, will depend on what ERC and Junts are able to articulate in the negotiations with the PSOE.
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