Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialists won a clear victory in Sunday’s Catalan regional election, in which Carles Puigdemont and fellow separatists lost their majority after 10 years in power.
The vote came six years after Puigdemont led a botched 2017 independence bid that triggered Spain’s worst political crisis in decades.
Led by Salvador Illa, the nation’s health minister during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Catalan Socialist party won 42 of the regional parliament’s 135 seats — nine more than in the previous election in 2021.
Photo: Bloomberg
Hailing the result as “historic” in a posting on X, Sanchez said it would mark the start of “a new era in Catalonia.”
“A new era for all Catalans, whatever they think,” Illa said as his supporters cheered his victory.
It was a major victory for Sanchez, who had wanted to show that his policy of defusing tensions triggered by the Catalan crisis had worked, ultimately reducing pro-independence sentiment in this wealthy northeastern region of 8 million people.
Moreover, it gives him some much-needed breathing space after a difficult start to his latest term in office which began in November last year and has been soured by right-wing opposition and a graft probe into his wife that almost caused him to resign.
Since becoming prime minister in 2018 in the months following the failed separatist bid, Sanchez has sought to “heal the wounds” caused by the unprecedented political crisis In 2021, he pardoned the separatists jailed over the secession bid and is currently advancing an amnesty bill for those still wanted by the justice system in exchange for key separatist backing that let him secure a new term in office.
In gaining more than 200,000 votes, the Socialists managed to deprive the pro-independence parties of the majority they needed to stay in power in a region they have ruled for the past decade.
Final results showed Puigdemont’s hardline Junt, the moderate ERC of outgoing Catalan leader Pere Aragones and the smaller hard-left CUP secured 59 seats, compared with 74 last time.
Even if they were to count the two seats won by the new ultranationalist Catalan Alliance, they would still be well short of the 68 seats required to rule. Junts won 35 seats, slightly higher than last time, while ERC fell sharply to 20, down 13, and CUP won just four, down from nine.
Puigdemont, 61, fled Spain to avoid prosecution following the botched secession bid and has lived in self-imposed exile ever since, running his campaign from southern France. Although he would be allowed back when the amnesty bill becomes law, he had hoped a strong showing in Sunday’s vote would have seen him re-elected leader, paving the way for a triumphant return. He pledged to retire from politics if he failed to win.
Despite his victory, Illa is still a long way from the 68 seats required to rule and must now seek out the necessary backing to be sworn in as regional leader. Although the Socialists also won most votes in 2021, Illa was unable to cobble together a majority while the separatists managed to piece together a 74-seat coalition.
Analysts said the most likely option would see the Socialists allying with the radical left Comuns Sumar, which won six seats, and ERC, which won 20. Together they could count exactly 68 seats.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS