Carles Puigdemont, independence president of the Catalonia region during the 2017 secession attempt, announced Monday, August 31, his break with his former party against the backdrop of strategic differences within the separatist movement.
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On his Twitter account, the separatist leader, who fled to Belgium in 2017 to escape prosecution by the Spanish courts, announced “
his decision to return his party card
” PDeCAT.
Other leaders of weight in training followed the example of Mr. Puigdemont.
This rupture comes after many tensions between Mr. Puigdemont and part of the leadership of this party, in disagreement with its strategy of permanent confrontation with the Spanish government and its inclination to the left while this formation is historically center-right.
Born in 2016, the PDeCAT is the heir of Convergence Démocratique de Catalogne (CDC), the main Catalan nationalist party during decades to which Mr. Puigdemont had joined in the early 1980s. Mr. Puigdemont had tried in 2018 to form another party , La Crida, with the aim of unsuccessfully bringing together all the fringes of Catalan independence.
In July, he formed another called Ensemble pour la Catalunya (Juntos por Cataluña), a name used in recent years by the PDeCAT during the elections, which provoked a legal confrontation between the party and the former Catalan regional president.
The divisions within the Catalan independence movement, without a clear strategy since the 2017 secession attempt, will lead to the calling of early regional elections in Catalonia, the date of which has not yet been set due to the coronavirus pandemic.
