Puigdemont: reality prevails one year later
Friday marked one year since both Salvador Illa's investiture as the new president and Carles Puigdemont's fleeting return to Catalonia. The dramatic operation that allowed the former president to enter and leave the country, evading the police, especially the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), who had planned his arrest at the gates of the Ciutadella (Ciutadella), grabbed headlines and had a significant media impact. And although not everyone within Junts liked it (the vast majority were unaware of their leader's plans and participated in a major diversionary maneuver), Puigdemont further cemented his reputation as a disruptive leader capable of altering the political landscape with a single blow.
However, a year later, the impact of much of that episode has faded, and a reality has taken hold: the person occupying the presidential office in the Palau de la Generalitat today is Salvador Illa, while Puigdemont continues to await the amnesty in exile. It's true that this situation is not his responsibility, nor even that of the Spanish government, but rather that of a judicial leadership that has declared rebellion and refuses to apply a law approved by Congress. In the end, then, another reality has also taken hold: that judges make and unmake laws regardless of their specific wording.
This year, Junts has tried to play its cards in Congress, where its votes are needed to gain prominence, but at the same time, it has struggled to project itself in Parliament as an alternative to Isla, since Puigdemont, from exile, can hardly act effectively as leader of the opposition. This will also be a debate that Junts will have to resolve if in the coming months the Constitutional Court rules in favor of applying the amnesty in Puigdemont's case: what role will the former president have to assume? Will he take his seat and lead the opposition in a return to pre-trial politics, or will he stay out of day-to-day politics to safeguard his profile as a supra-party leader of the 1-O referendum? It is not an easy decision, in any case.
What is clear is that Catalonia, like all countries, needs a strong and credible opposition, and that role falls to Junts. And being in opposition doesn't mean not speaking out on everything, which is what the People's Party (PP) does in Spain, for example. It means combining criticism with specific agreements on national issues, such as the defense of the Catalan language. But until Puigdemont can return to Catalonia as a free man in compliance with a rule that the Constitutional Court has already made clear is constitutional, there will be no normality possible in Catalan politics, nor will the opposition-government game be able to develop without interference. President Isla himself made this clear in the interview with ARA when he said he hoped to start the school year with all political actors authorized. The school year probably won't be able to start this way, but Puigdemont's definitive and not fleeting return should happen before the end of the year.
