"The moment has arrived": Lluís Puig crosses the border and returns to Catalonia after nine years of exile

BarcelonaThe Minister of Culture during the 1-O government, Lluís Puig, returned this Wednesday to Catalonia after seven years of exile. His return had transpired in the last few hours and the Junts deputy crossed the border this morning. “The time has come,” wrote Puig on X shortly after 7:15 a.m., a message with which he confirmed that he will celebrate his return this same Wednesday at an event in Terrassa, his city, and that he plans to attend the Parliament plenary session in person on Thursday.

In his first statements after his return, to 3CatInfo, Puig encouraged the independence movement to “find a way to move forward” towards independence: “I hope we have learned a lot about moving towards here,” he said. Almost a decade had to pass for Puig to be able to return to the Principality, once the repression suffered by the independence movement following the 'Procés' has been overcome. The lifting of the arrest warrant issued by judge Pablo Llarena has finally paved the way for his return to the country, although the judicial case remains to be archived as a full application of the amnesty. The expectation is that this step will happen soon, just as it already happened this Tuesday with the total amnesty for the former ministers Oriol Junqueras, Raül Romeva, Dolors Bassa and Jordi Turull.

Puig, who throughout the entire legislative term has been able to carry out his representative duties remotely, will finally be able to occupy his seat in Parliament this Thursday, and he will do so “with his head held high” and eager to remove the yellow ribbon that has occupied his place in the hemicycle for “too many years.” “I am very excited to sit in the seat that I democratically earned,” he celebrated in the interview with 3CatInfo.

The president of the chamber, Josep Rull, will receive him at the doors of the chamber, as he explained in statements to RAC 1, and the members of the board – all in favor of the implementation of the amnesty – will also welcome him. Subsequently, the former minister will address a few words from the hemicycle.

Puig is the first of the three pro-independence leaders who were in exile to return, given that former minister Toni Comín will come this weekend, although he will already land in Madrid on Thursday to obtain his seat as an MEP. Regarding former president Carles Puigdemont, it is taken for granted that he will not return to Catalonia until after the Spanish elections on November 29th. The leader of Junts, however, wished Puig a good return in a message on X, in which he thanked his former Minister of Culture for the “resistance, courage and deep love for Catalonia”. “Thank you for not giving up and for the accompaniment of all these years”, he added.

The first event in which Puig will participate in Catalonia will be the Songs for Freedom, a singing event that has been held every evening in his native Terrassa since the autumn of 2017. All this, after having spent the last five years of exile in Northern Catalonia, where he has developed extensive cultural work within the Catalanist fabric. He has been linked, in this sense, to the Casa Macià in Prats de Molló, where the former president of the Generalitat devised a military incursion to liberate Catalonia, although it failed.

He also took the opportunity to make some discreet visits to Catalonia, as he recently revealed. Now he will be able to do so without the risk of being arrested, in a return that, as he explained in an interview in August with ARA, he trusts will serve as a stimulus: "If the return serves to start a new phase of the movement, fantastic; I will be much more proud to contribute to it," he argued.

Junts-PSC struggle to claim the "victory" of the return

Puig's seat in Parliament was still occupied this Wednesday by a yellow ribbon. The image of the former minister removing it hovered this morning over the Parliament plenary session, and both the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, as well as Junts and Esquerra wanted to claim the credit for it during the control session. Illa remarked that "since the beginning of this legislative term" the PSC has supported the amnesty and warned Junts, whom he accused of "having some deal" with the Spanish right and far-right, that with a Spanish government formed by PP and Vox, those convicted for the 'Procés' "would not have recovered their political rights".

Conversely, the president of the Junts parliamentary group, Mònica Sales, reproached him for having previously opposed the amnesty law and stated that the law could be approved and applied thanks to the fact that Junts "knew how to leverage the 7 deputies" it has in Congress. In the same vein, the president of the Republican parliamentary group, Josep Maria Jové, asked the President of the Generalitat to "acknowledge the error" of opposing the pardon measure in the past and not to "appropriate the victories of others," although he did thank him for the "unwavering" defense he currently makes of the law.