After years of legal wrangling, Spain’s constitutional court is expected to remove the last obstacle to the return of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont after nearly nine years in exile this week.
Puigdemont fled in 2017 to avoid being jailed for his part in the failed and illegal independence push for which nine of his colleagues were imprisoned on sentences of up to 13 years, although all were released within three years.
If on 6 October the court decides, as expected, that the charge of misuse of public funds is covered by the amnesty law passed by the Spanish government in 2024, Puigdemont should be free to return without fear of arrest.
But will he come back like Lenin, leaping from the train in St Petersburg to galvanise the faltering revolution, or as yesterday’s man, the last of the Romanovs, bound for the dustbin of history?
Whether he returns in triumph or, as he departed, in the boot of a car, Catalonia today is very different from the place he left nine years ago.
Firstly, the political climate has changed beyond recognition. The fervour of mass demonstrations and constant conflict and provocation between Barcelona and Madrid has given way to a climate of cooperation.
Since 2024, the region has been governed by the Socialists’ party of Catalonia (PSC), the first time since 1980 that a non-nationalist party has been in charge. Led by Salvador Illa, Spain’s health minister during the Covid epidemic, it has ushered in an era of entente with Madrid, where the Socialist Workers’ party, to which the PSC serves as a regional section, is also in the driving seat.
Another change is that those young people who got fired up about independence are not only older now but face issues that are more pressing than sovereignty, principally jobs and housing. Wages are low, rents high and mortgages mostly out of reach. As a result, 82% of Catalonia’s 18- to 30-year-olds still live with their parents. On Friday Puigdemont’s Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia) voted down the government’s progressive housing proposals, a move that won’t endear them to young Catalans, nor to their parents.
The other big change since 2017 is demographic. When Puigdemont went into exile, 13.8% of the Catalan population was foreign-born; the figure today is 18.7%. This shift is most marked in the capital, Barcelona, where 32% of residents are immigrants representing 118 nationalities, a figure that rises to 50% in the 12-35 age group.
For nationalists, this raises the question: who is a Catalan? Jordi Pujol, the Catalan president from 1980 to 2003, insisted that a Catalan was anyone who lived and worked in Catalonia.
Things are a little different now. Out of the disillusion of the independence movement has risen Aliança Catalana, a far-right nationalist party whose leader says “there isn’t room for everyone” in Catalonia.
Specifically, there would be no room for Muslims, not even those born in Spain, which by implication would include, for example, the Barcelona and Spain football star Lamine Yamal.
This has dragged Junts, traditionally the party of the Catalan bourgeoisie, to the right as those on the ethno-nationalist margins gravitate towards the unselfconsciously racist Aliança, whose positions on sovereignty are otherwise barely distinguishable from Junts’.
Over the past 25 years, Catalonia, and above all Barcelona, has gone from being a bicultural, bilingual Catalan-Spanish society to one that is multicultural and multilingual.
Puigdemont’s pitch is based on identity and a historical sense of grievance at Spain’s perceived abuse of and disdain for Catalonia, a sentiment shared by many, perhaps most, Catalans.
This ingrained sense of difference and grievance isn’t going away, but his vision may prove a harder sell than it was 10 years ago.
As demography changes, so does identity. Immigrants now make up nearly a fifth of the population, have their own identity issues and have no particular beef with Spain. As for independence, support never did reach 50%, and now hovers in the low 40s.
Besides, as people migrate in search of a better or perhaps a more interesting life, it is becoming increasingly likely that the parents of those living in Catalonia will be from different countries, and their sense of national identity is multiple or simply not that important.
Puigdemont’s lifelong dream is for Catalonia to take its place among the world’s independent nation states. Yet perhaps he is a man out of time and the nation state he craves, with its monocultural, monolingual badge of identity, has passed its sell-by date.
