Catalonia’s leader won’t say if region declared independence
MADRID — The Spanish government has given a new ultimatum to Catalonia’s separatist leader to clarify whether he was withdrawing his plan to declare independence from Spain, after a Monday morning deadline for the separatists to make their intentions clear came and went.
After a perplexing speech Oct. 10 before Catalonia’s parliament, Carles Puigdemont, the region’s leader, sent a letter to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy asking to negotiate a solution but declining to clarify whether independence had been declared.
“Mr. Puigdemont has a serious problem, not only in terms of respecting legality but also respecting citizens who are asking for clarity,” Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, deputy prime minister of Spain, said at a news conference in Madrid shortly after receiving Puigdemont’s letter.
The Catalan leader “should respond yes or no” by Thursday, she said.
“It’s in his hands to avoid that the next steps be taken,” she said, although she would not detail how Madrid might use the emergency measures at its disposal if Puigdemont refused.
Puigdemont’s strategy is unclear. He may be attempting to drag his feet until the crisis in Catalonia provokes an international effort at mediation, as he has urged, however unlikely that may be.
He may also by trying to push Rajoy to fulfill his own pledge to put an end to the secessionist challenge, which could in turn help galvanize Catalonia’s independence movement if Rajoy uses emergency measures to reduce the region’s level of autonomy.
Rajoy initiated a request last week for his government to invoke Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution — a broad, forceful tool that has never been used — that would allow him to take control of the region.
Facing a 10 a.m. deadline Monday, Puigdemont asked for an urgent meeting with Rajoy, according to a copy of his letter, and suggested that the conflict could be resolved, with the help of international mediators, within two months.
He also called on Rajoy to end “the repression against the Catalan people and government,” referring to a court summons issued for the chief of the autonomous Catalan police force and the two leaders of the main pro-independence citizens’ movements. All could face sedition charges.
Catalan Police Chief Josep Lluís Trapero was questioned Monday for a second time by Spain’s national court about why his officers could not stop a street protest in September and why they failed to close polling stations before the referendum voting started, as had been ordered by Madrid. The referendum was marred by violent clashes between voters and national police.
The judge in charge of the case indicted Trapero on Monday. But the judge rejected the public prosecution’s demand that the police chief be held in jail without bail pending a trial. Significantly, however, the judge ordered the two leaders of the largest pro-independence citizens’ movements to be detained without bail while authorities determine whether to charge them with sedition.
In his letter, Puigdemont wrote that “the priority for my government is to search intensely for dialogue.” But he did not address the crucial question of whether he had declared independence in his address to parliament last week.
The speech, which came after a highly disputed referendum on the matter Oct. 1, was meant to create “deliberate confusion,” according to Rajoy, in part because Puigdemont is struggling to keep together his fragile separatist coalition.
Hard-line secessionists want an abrupt and unilateral rupture with the central government in Madrid, while conservative and more moderate separatists have become increasingly worried about the consequences of such a move for Catalonia, particularly after hundreds of companies announced plans to relocate their headquarters outside the region.
Rajoy wrote back to Puigdemont on Monday and rejected the separatist argument that Catalonia had long been mistreated, as part of a historic conflict between Madrid and Barcelona, Catalonia’s capital.
Rajoy wrote that the decisions of Puigdemont’s government had “generated a significant fracture within Catalan society, as well as enormous economic uncertainty,” according to a copy of the letter that was distributed to the news media by his government office.
Earlier Monday, Sáenz de Santamaría poured cold water on Puigdemont’s repeated calls for international mediation in a territorial conflict that Madrid considers to be strictly an issue of domestic sovereignty.
She said that Rajoy’s government was open to dialogue, but within the Spanish parliament and only after Puigdemont acknowledged that the referendum and independence declaration violated the Spanish Constitution.
Puigdemont’s reply Monday, she suggested, was intended to help gain the support from the European Union, which separatists have failed to obtain.
“We have the feeling that Mr. Puigdemont is addressing his letter much more to people outside than to the citizens,” she said.
On Monday, Alfonso Dastis, Spain’s foreign minister, told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting with his European counterparts that Puigdemont’s latest response showed that he was “under the influences of the most radicals” among the Catalan independence movement.
Last week, Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium said in an interview with Belgian newspaper Le Soir that Europe should recognize the Catalan crisis as a challenge that requires a political dialogue.