Puigdemont to leave his parliamentary seat

The day after losing his immunity as an MEP, Carles Puigdemont has said he will give up his seat in the Catalan Parliament. In fact, the former president has to resign from the Catalan hemicycle in order to keep the MEP seat, since the two positions are incompatible. For this reason, it is not a novelty that Puigdemont leaves the Parliament, since although he was the head of the list of Junts, it had already been specified in campaign that he did it symbolically and that the "useful bet" of the party was Laura Borràs. In his place, Josep Costa, the first member of Junts of the circumscription of Barcelona that remained without representation, will enter Parliament.

In an interview to Catalunya Ràdio, Puigdemont also explained that this past Tuesday he spoke with Oriol Junqueras after the revocation of the open prison regime of political prisoners. He added that they did not assess the results of 14-F and, therefore, did not enter into negotiations to form a government nor speak about the Parliamentary board. They met on the same day that JxCat, ERC and the CUP sat down for the first time at a table together to try to come up with an agreement to constitute the Catalan Parliament. In fact, Puigdemont believes that the government agreement "will not be easy nor fast". "We have to rebuild trust and respect, and this needs intense work", he said in a second interview to Tv3. The ex-president affirms that Laura Borràs would be a good president of the Catalan chamber: "It would be fantastic that the Parliament was presided over by a woman and that she was from JxCat".

Charge against the State

Puigdemont, despite announcing the resignation of the seat and announcing that there have been talks with Junqueras, has not forgotten the vote in the European Parliament that yesterday lifted his immunity, but was far from doing so unanimously. That is why he considers that they have achieved "a political message in the vote". "The political battle is not lost", he said. Nor has he overlooked the first step of the Spanish justice system to extradite him. The former president believes that behind Pablo Llarena's prejudicial questions to the CJEU, the Spanish state is taking the first step in the process of extraditing him to Spain. The Spanish state is the same "whether the PP or the PSOE governs", he said, also denouncing the revocation of the open regime of political prisoners.