In an atypical plenary session, the Socialist, Republican Left and En Comu parties agree on a new leader

▲ Salvador Illa leaving the Catalan Parliament as the new local president. In the image on the right, the exiled separatist leader Carles Puigdemont, before leaving the stage in Barcelona yesterday, where he was a speaker, and evading the arrest warrant against him.Photo Ap and Afp

Armando G. Tejeda

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, August 9, 2024, p. 28

Madrid. In one of the most atypical parliamentary sessions of recent decades, the socialist Salvador Illa was sworn in as the new president of Catalonia, thanks to the votes of three parties: the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC), En Comu Podem and the pro-independence Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC).

However, the debate was marked by the reappearance of former president Carles Puigdemont, who after seven years in exile He returned to Barcelona to give a brief speech in front of around a thousand supporters and then disappeared again, without being arrested by the police force activated for that purpose.

The day on which the socialist Illa buried almost 15 uninterrupted years of nationalist governments, a period in which the failed unilateral independence process of 2017 was promoted, was marked by the appearance and escape of Puigdemont.

The presence of the pro-independence leader in Catalonia was public, announced several days in advance and with dozens of cameras broadcasting his first political rally live, and yet the former president was able to evade the controls, and his whereabouts are still unknown as of the time of going to press.

Some say he has returned to Belgium, where he has lived for seven years, and others say he is in the south of France or hiding somewhere in the north of Spain waiting for the controversy over his death to subside. incursion in the country.

The Catalan regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, who were in charge of carrying out the court order for his arrest, activated for four hours what they called Operation Cage, which aimed to locate and arrest the former president. But it was useless.

The only concrete result of the operation was the location of the vehicle in which he fled, owned by a Catalan regional police officer, who was subsequently arrested, as was another officer who also collaborated with the nationalist politician’s escape.

In addition, 22 people were slightly injured during the rally and subsequent dissolution of the gathering of Puigdemont supporters outside Parliament, who were sprayed with pepper spray by riot police from the regional public security forces.

Despite the fact that there was an intense police operation in Barcelona to locate the former president, that all political parties were more attentive to whether they would finally locate him or not, and that even the president of the Parliament, Josep Rull, former advisor to the Puigdemont government, considered suspending the plenary session to guarantee the rights of all deputies, in reference to the former president’s impediment to participate in the debate due to the court order against him, finally the socialist Illa managed to push through the investiture by 68 votes in favor against 66 against, and will govern Catalonia until 2028.

In this way, Illa becomes the third president of the Generalitat from the socialist ranks since the restoration of democracy, after Pasqual Maragall and José Montilla.