Puigdemont to meet his MPs in Germany with presidency debate at stake

Carles Puigdemont has called all his parliamentary group MPs for a meeting to be held on Saturday in Germany, the Catalan News Agency has learned. The debate on who the new Catalan leader will be is at stake, after the candidacy, Junts per Catalunya (JxCat), has made four failed attempts to swear in a new president in the past few months. The Spanish judiciary has barred any candidate for president in prison or abroad ever since the Catalan election was held on December 21 and the pro-independence parties kept their majority, with JxCat being the strongest among them.

Three possible outcomes

A new leader for Catalonia must be elected by May 22, otherwise a snap election will automatically be called. Junts per Catalunya and especially its leader, Puigdemont, have to decide whether they present a new candidate for president who is not involved in the independence judicial case – this would likely find no opposition from the Spanish courts.

An alternative would be insisting on the presidential candidates that have already been banned. This option, though, has one risk – if it fails and there is no chosen president by May 22, citizens will have to cast their ballots again. A third, and less likely, scenario would be not proposing anyone else and forcing a new election.

“We want to avoid election”                                  

Junts per Catalunya and Puigdemont’s official stance is to avoid a new vote. “We want no election, but it would be naïve to think that there is zero risk of holding a new vote, because there is another side that also plays, Spain,” Puigdemont said in his first interview after being released from a German prison on April 15.

Some sources in JxCat said to the Catalan News Agency that if they have to give up Puigdemont’s candidacy for president – he has been barred from being sworn in from Germany by the Spanish Constitutional Court – the new leader would be “temporary” and would have to accept Puigdemont as “legitimate president from exile.” Some commentators think MP Elsa Artadi might be the chosen one, and even a jailed senior MP, Jordi Sànchez, said she has all his "support." The candidacy plans to swear in Puigdemont once more at some point of this term once the new government is up and running.