Separatists lose Catalan majority as Spain Socialists surge

BARCELONA: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists won a clear victory in Sunday’s Catalan regional election, in which Carles Puigdemont and fellow separatists lost their majority after 10 years in power.

The vote came six years after Puigdemont led a botched 2017 independence bid that triggered Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.

Led by Salvador Illa, Spain’s health minister during the pandemic, the Catalan Socialist party won 42 of the regional parliament’s 135 seats – nine more than in the previous election in 2021.

Hailing the result as “historic” in a posting on X, Sanchez said it would mark the start of “a new era in Catalonia”.

“A new era for all Catalans, whatever they think,” said Illa as his supporters cheered his victory.

It was a major victory for Sanchez, who had wanted to show that his policy of defusing tensions triggered by the Catalan crisis had worked, ultimately reducing pro-independence sentiment in this wealthy northeastern region of eight million people.

And it gives him some muchneeded breathing space after a difficult start to his latest term in office which began in November and has been soured by rightwing opposition and a graft probe into his wife that almost caused him to resign. –