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Spain’s acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez must halt all legal action against Catalan separatists to secure re-election, the region’s pro-independence leader at large said the prime minister needs his support to govern.
Catalan Solidarity party founder Carles Puigdemont has set a high price for the party’s seven votes that Sanchez needs to secure a majority in Spain’s parliament in July’s general election .
Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, he demanded an amnesty and “fully and effectively renounced judicial action against independence”. Puigdemont faces the possibility of arrest if he returns to Spain, along with hundreds of others facing legal action over his 2017 push for independence.
The opposition People’s Party was quick to denounce the idea of an amnesty as “disrespectful”.
Spain is governed by a caretaker government led by Sanchez, while his Socialist Party negotiates a possible parliamentary deal with five small regional and separatist parties. The prime minister has been accused of brazen political expediency by the Conservative People’s Party, which won the most votes in July’s election but has no clear path to a majority.
Together for Catalonia, known simply as “Junts” in Catalan, is the prime minister’s most formidable potential partner. Puigdemont was a promoter of Catalonia’s 2017 independence referendum, which judges ruled illegal and sparked Spain’s worst national crisis since the restoration of democracy.
Puigdemont, then president of the autonomous region and one of the targets of Spain’s arrest warrants, said the Spanish parliament was “within reach” to enact an amnesty law.
“Abandoning the crackdown on the democratic independence movement is a moral imperative,” he said.
But he added that his past dealings with Sanchez meant that Catalonia’s most radical separatist party, Solidarity, lacked trust in the government. As such, it also calls for the creation of new mechanisms to “verify and guarantee” the implementation of future agreements.
Puigdemont said it would not be easy to negotiate definitively: “We did not endure these years to save the legislature.”
Any amnesty deal would bring new criticism to Sanchez. He has already been maligned on the right for relying on votes from other parties seeking to divide Spain during his first term, including descendants of the political faction from the defunct Basque terrorist group ETA.
Responding to Puigdemont, PP leader Alberto Nunez Fejo said the amnesty was “unconstitutional and an offense to Spanish democracy”.
The BJP’s first attempt to form a government later this month is expected to fail because it does not have enough votes. Sanchez will get his chance in October or November. If he fails, Spain will have to hold another election early next year, as it did in 2015-16 and 2019.
Puigdemont spoke a day after meeting Spanish government ministers for the first time since fleeing Spain in late 2017. On Monday, he held “fruitful” talks with Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, in which they agreed to “explore all possible solutions”. Democratic solutions to deconflict Catalonia’s politics”.
Allies of Sanchez insisted that Diaz met Puigdemont not as a representative of the government, but as the leader of her leftist Sumar party, which will form a coalition with the Socialist Party . They also said the prime minister had only learned of the meeting the day before, a claim Feio disputed.
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