Election deepens crisis in Catalonia
Offer of talks rebuffed as Spain takes hard line
The crisis over Catalan independence deepened Friday as Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, rebuffed an offer of talks from Carles Puigdemont in the wake of the secessionist victory at the polls.
Puigdemont spoke from his self-imposed exile in Belgium to call on Rajoy to negotiate, after the snap elections ordered by the Spanish leader in a bid to crush the secessionist project instead returned its architects to power.
Insisting the “Rajoy recipe” had failed, the ousted Catalan president said proindependence parties, who secured an absolute majority of 70 seats, had “at a minimum ... won the right to be listened to.”
“Mariano Rajoy needs to rectify ( the situation) and I am willing to meet with him in any country of the European Union apart from Spain, for obvious reasons,” said Puigdemont, who faces a warrant for his arrest if he returns to Spain. Such talks must take place without any preconditions, he stressed.
But asked at a press conference about Puigdemont’s offer, Spain’s conservative leader roundly dismissed the prospect. “The person I should sit down with and talk is the who won the elections, Ines Arrimadas,” Rajoy said, referring to the leader of the pro-union Ciudadanos, which won the most seats as a single party.
Rajoy went on to confirm that “whatever government emerges” from the election result, his government’s direct rule over Catalonia under Article 155 would end and that he would “make an effort to develop a dialogue” with Catalonia’s next president.
But he cast doubt on whether that would be Puigdemont. “I will have to talk with whoever is president of the Generalitat, but for that they have to take possession,” Rajoy said, in a thinly veiled reference to the former lead- er’s fugitive status.
The secessionist victory opens up the possibility of a dramatic return to Catalonia by Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium with four members of his deposed cabinet to avoid arrest on sedition and rebellion charges after October’s unilateral independence declaration.
Puigdemont reiterated Thursday that if the new parliament approved him as president, he would return to take up office, adding that it would be “unacceptable” if the election results could not be implemented. But Rajoy shrugged off calls to drop the charges against Puigdemont and his former cabinet members, two of whom remain in prison along with protest leaders.
He stressed that no one can “place themselves above the law”, adding that the ongoing investigation was a matter for the courts.
The wheels of Spain’s judiciary continued to turn against the pro- independence leaders yesterday, with the Supreme Court judge who is leading the investigation naming six other politicians as possible suspects. Chief among them were Artur Mas, the predecessor of Puigdemont as Catalan president, and Marta Rovira, the deputy leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia.
Puigdemont hopes that the European Union, in the wake of the results, might put pressure on Rajoy to come to the table.
Yesterday, he issued a plea to the bloc, saying he was asking only for it to “listen to everyone”.