Puigdemont calls for calm in rift over yellow symbols

Former president Carles Puigdemont has weighed in on the controversy over the yellow symbols supporting jailed and exiled political leaders. On his Twitter account on Wednesday, Puigdemont made a call “not to escalate the conflict over the yellow ribbons” and warned about “falling for provocations that only fuel radical attitudes.”

The Catalan leader tweeted his comments after the heads of the Ciutadans party, Albert Rivera and Inés Arrimadas, publicly removed yellow ribbons from the main boulevard in the town of Alella, 20 km up the coast from Barcelona. Rivera defended the decision to “cleanse public spaces of ideological symbols” in the face of inaction from the Spanish government.

In his tweet, Puigdemont encouraged people to resist those “who have designed an escalation of the confrontation,” but he also advised doing so “calmly” and without “falling for provocations” that will make “dialogue between both sides more difficult.”

Catalunya en Comú: "Lack of humanity"

Some Catalan political parties reacted critically to the Alella protest by Ciutadans. A spokeswoman for the Catalunya en Comú party, which aligns with neither the pro-independence or unionist parties, asked on Twitter “how politics can be done with such a lack of humanity” and called the act “low and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, the spokesman in the Spanish parliament for the pro-independence ERC party said it was “normal” that the yellow symbols should “bother” the Cs leaders so much, because they “remind them that there are people in prison or in exile,” he said, sarcastically adding that if only “they should be so bothered by a cross or a Francoist symbol.”