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After giving a speech from the symbolic Arc de Triomf in Barcelona and then evading a police dragnet, Carles Puigdemont has made it back to Belgium.
“Today I’m in Waterloo after a few extremely difficult days,” he posted on X Friday night.
The former president of Catalonia and figurehead of the region’s independence movement has been living in exile in Belgium since 2017. But earlier this week, he appeared in public in the Catalonian capital and then vanished before police could arrest him.
Puigdemont chose to return on the day that the Catalan parliament was voting on Socialist Salvador Illa becoming the region’s new president.
“I wanted to be present during the investiture session and be able to exercise my right to speak and vote,” Puigdemont said in a video shared on X on Saturday. The former regional leader said that “it had become clear from the outset that the Department of the Interior had set up a police operation” to prevent him from entering the Catalan parliament.
“Trying to access the parliament would have been equivalent to a voluntary surrender, and my intention has never been to surrender,” Puigdemont said, accusing the judicial authorities of “playing politics.”
On Saturday, the Catalan government moved on with the procedures to form a new government as newly elected President Illa officially took office during a ceremony in which he promised to “govern for everyone,” with respect to “the diversity and plurality of the people of Catalonia” and avoiding “divisive, demagogic and populist” approaches, national media reported.
The members of the new government will be announced next week. The new president already said during the election campaign that the socialist mayor of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Núria Parlon, will be the interior minister; and the former director general of the Catalan police force who was removed from his post in 2017, Josep Lluís Trapero, will be reinstated.
