Catalan separatist leader meets with Spanish PM
Carles Puigdemont, leader of the main Catalan separatist party JuntsxCat, will meet with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez today.
Puigdemont has been living in exile in Belgium following the unsuccessful attempt at organizing a referendum for Catalan independence in 2017. Nevertheless, the Spanish PM did not originally confirm the meeting, saying he is only meeting Catalan regional leader Pere Aragones while in Brussels for a European Council meeting.
After failing to secure an outright majority in this summer’s general election, Sanchez’s PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) had to rely on the votes of all regional parties in Spain, including Puigdemont’s controversial JuntsxCat party, to form government. The announcement of Puigdmenont’s support for Sanchez’s coalition in exchange for a controversial amnesty deal caused uproar in Spain, with thousands of mostly conservative voters taking to the streets.
The coalition deal and the promise of a pardon to the Catalan separatists are unlikely to calm tensions over the status of Catalonia in the near future. However, supporters of the deal argued that Catalan separatist parties had already started to lose electoral support, as most voters in Catalonia cast strategic votes for PSOE, meaning that Sanchez’s gambit could pay off.