People's Party asks French Assembly to reject Puigdemont event in Perpignan

Spain's People's Party has asked the French Assembly to officially reject Carles Puigdemont's 100,000-strong event in Perpignan on Saturday.

The conservatives' second-in-command, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, sent a letter to the 'Assemblée Nationale' president, Richard Ferrand, urging the chamber to make an institutional declaration against the pro-independence rally.

For her, it was "bizarrely provocative" that former president Puigdemont said he was in Catalonia when he first set foot in French Catalonia.

The letter also reads that the Catalan exiled MEP wants to destroy "the system of rights and freedoms that the Kingdom of Spain shared with the French Republic."

Álvarez de Toledo is "deeply concerned" and insisted in the letter that Puigdemont is a "fugitive."

"He rejected to appear before the Spanish courts," the People's Party official said.

"Fake institution"

Meanwhile the president of also unionist Ciudadanos in Catalonia, Carlos Carrizosa, said that Puigdemont's private organization, Consell per la República, hosting the rally, is a "fake and antidemocratic institution."

For him, the organization "exclude those who are against independence."

Carrizosa rejected that "a fugitive can freely move across Europe."