The former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont has been remanded in custody in northern Germany pending a decision on extradition proceedings brought by Spain.
The German authorities have 60 days in which to reach a decision on the extradition request, which Puigdemont opposed during Monday’s hearing.
Puigdemont was detained under an international arrest warrant in the northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein on Sunday morning as he journeyed by car from Helsinki to Brussels, where he has been living in self-imposed exile since Catalonia’s unilateral declaration of independence last October. Spain wants to extradite him on charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds in relation to that declaration.
The Spanish secret services have revealed that after they learned that Puigdemont planned to make the trip from Helsinki to Brussels by car, they fitted a geolocation device to the vehicle, and the 12 agents monitoring him were thus able to tip off the authorities when he crossed into Germany.
Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has not commented on Puigdemont’s arrest and possible extradition, but his deputy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, described it as good news, and said: “No one can evade justice forever.”
The immediate benefit for the Spanish government of Puigdemont being remanded in custody is that, for now at least, he will be silenced. While other Catalan leaders have been either jailed or hushed by the threat of prison, as long as Puigdemont was at large he could continue to use his skills as a journalist and propagandist to keep the issue of Catalan independence in the headlines.
Meanwhile, Catalonia remains without a government and there is little prospect of one being formed. In an effort to appease Puigdemont’s supporters – tens of thousands of whom took to the streets of Barcelona and other Catalan cities on Sunday night – the three main secessionist groups have called for a plenary session of parliament on Wednesday to “guarantee the right of Puigdemont to be president”.
Elsa Artadi, leader of the former president’s Together for Catalonia party, said: “We have to work to make Puigdemont a real, not a symbolic president.”
Much as he might wish to, Rajoy cannot shelve the Catalan issue, above all because he urgently needs to get his budget approved. To do so he needs the votes of the five Basque nationalist MPs in parliament, and they are withholding their approval until Madrid lifts article 155 of the constitution through which direct rule was imposed on Catalonia last October.
However, 155 can only be lifted once a new Catalan government has been installed. When Rajoy called elections last December it was in the hope that the slim secessionist majority would be overturned. It was not, and as a result Catalonia continues to be a stone in Madrid’s shoe.
While everyone agrees that Catalonia needs a government as soon as possible, forming one seems to be as far away as ever. The grassroots separatist leader Jordi Sànchez, previously out of the running after a judge would not release him from preventive custody, has not ruled out his candidacy after the UN human rights committee issued a ruling, favourable in principle, on his right to be released for the investiture.
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