A dyed-in-the-wool partisan independence leader
Carles Puigdemont, the leader of Catalonia who pressed ahead with a banned independence referendum yesterday, has been a convinced secessionist since his youth, long before the issue moved to the centre of Catalan politics.
The destiny of this 54-year-old journalist changed in January 2016 when he was selected at the last minute to lead a coalition of separatist parties that won a majority of seats in the regional parliament three months earlier.
A virtual unknown when he became president of the northeastern Spanish region of 7.5 million people, he has since doggedly pursued the goal of winning independence for Catalonia. It has made him the main enemy of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government.
“In these hugely intense and hugely emotional moments, we sense that what we once thought was only a dream is within reach,” he told a crowd of cheering supporters on Friday, as he closed his campaign for the referendum ruled unconstitutional by the courts.
In Amer, the small mountainous village of 2,200 people where Puigdemont grew up in a modest family of bakers, and in Girona, where he served as mayor from 2011 to 2016, he is recalled as a convinced separatist.
“In Catalonia many people became separatists in an allergic reaction to Madrid’s policies. Not him, he always had these convictions,” said Puigdemont’s friend Antoni Puigverd, a poet and journalist.
Puigdemont, who wears his hair in a shaggy Beatles-style mop, has never hidden his separatist convictions, not even back in 1980 when he joined the conservative nationalist Convergencia Democratica de Catalunya (CDC) party.
At the time the CDC merely wanted to negotiate greater autonomy for Catalonia — far from the idea of breaking away from Spain.
His friend Salvador Clara, a left-wing secessionist councillor in Amer, added Puigdemont had defended the independence of Catalonia “since he can remember”.
In July 2015 Puigdemont became president of the Association of Municipalities for Independence, which brings together local entities to promote the right to self-determination.
For 17 years he worked for Catalonia’s nationalist daily El Punt, which now publishes under the name El Punt Avui after merging with another paper. He later created a regional news agency and an Englishlanguage newspaper about his region.
“He always combined his political activism with journalism,” said Ramon Iglesias, a journalist.
He was born on December 29, 1962.