Catalan Parliament opening session underway

The new Catalan Parliament is happening. The opening session in the chamber is up and running after an interim bureau was formed today at 11am, presided by the eldest elected MP, Ernest Maragall, and the two youngest ones, Gerard Gómez del Moral and Rut Ribas. In the session, a new Catalan Parliament president and new bureau members have to be appointed.

The work of the interim bureau in the opening session is usually a formality. Yet this time, Ernest Maragall took the opportunity to make an unusually strong speech in defense of the leaders in jail or in Brussels. He also said that "the December 21 election result is confirmation of the October 1 independence vote, it is a good map of today’s Catalan society: diverse, complex, the society that this Parliament will have to represent with total respect."

The three pro-independence MPs who are in jail asked to vote by proxy in this session. Oriol Junqueras (Esquerra), Joaquim Forn and Jordi Sànchez (Together for Catalonia) will delegate their votes to other MPs, something that the interim bureau formed only for this Wednesday’s session has to consider.

The elected MPs in Brussels, including president Puigdemont, have not asked to vote by proxy. The pro-independence forces believe that their votes will not be necessary to ensure they control the chamber’s bureau after this Wednesday’s session. They do not want to risk Madrid challenging this Wednesday’s votes in court.

Indeed, the Spanish Supreme court said last week that it was for the Catalan Parliament to decide how to grant a vote by proxy for the MPs in prison. It made no mention about the ones in Brussels. Meanwhile, the Spanish government made clear on Tuesday that it would challenge in the Spanish Constitutional Court any vote in the chamber that allows the MPs in Belgium to take part remotely.

The five elected MPs in Brussels will not attend the opening session of the new political term, as they risk arrest by Spanish police as soon as they set foot in Catalonia again. By the end of January, another session in the chamber has to be held to pick a new Catalan president. Carles Puigdemont is the candidate for the pro-independence bloc, but how he intends to go about being sworn in from Brussels remains unclear.