Separatists Leave Jail for Day to Sit in Spanish Parliament

(Bloomberg) -- Five Catalan separatist leaders emerged from jail to take up their seats in Spain’s parliament on Tuesday in an act of political theater that may inflame passions on both sides of the divided country.

Oriol Junqueras, the leader of the Esquerra Republicana party, is among four pro-independence campaigners who won seats in the lower house in general elections last month to participate in a session to constitute Spain’s new parliament. Raul Romeva, a former head of foreign affairs in the Catalan government, also went to the Senate to take his seat.

Asked if he would promise to abide by Spain’s Constitution, Junqueras said amid scenes of uproar that he would do so “from Republican commitment, as a political prisoner and by legal imperative.” He briefly shook hands with acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Junqueras told him the two needed to talk, said Gabriel Rufian, an Esquerra deputy.

The spectacle of separatist leaders mingling with deputies in Madrid’s neo-classical parliament building thrust the still-raw Catalan conflict back into the spotlight. The five men are currently being held on remand as they undergo a high-profile trial for their part in a failed 2017 attempt to declare Catalan independence.

While Sanchez has stressed the need for dialog in Catalonia, the conflict remains a thorn in his side.

His Socialists emerged as the biggest party in parliament in last month’s elections. But he may still need to rely on the abstention of Junqueras’s Esquerra party to ensure he can win support for a new term as premier.

The government signaled it was unlikely the separatist deputies would be able to exercise their parliamentary functions for long. Acting Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo told Ser radio on Tuesday that it was “obvious” that they will be suspended by the body that organizes parliamentary business.

“Many Spaniards feel humiliated to see those that staged a coup d’etat, that hate our country, that insult us are seated in parliament as if nothing had happened,” Ines Arrimadas, a deputy and spokeswoman for Ciudadanos, a center-right party, told state broadcaster TVE.

Even so, the Catalan conflict -- a divisive theme in the general election campaign -- continues to reverberate in Spanish politics. A survey by state pollster CIS shows a republican platform including Esquerra and Basque and Galician nationalists could win three seats in European elections May 26.

It also showed Carles Puigdemont, the former Catalan regional president who engineered the bid to secede in 2017 and is now a fugitive from Spanish justice in Belgium, potentially winning one seat. There’s a problem though: he would have to come first to Madrid -- and face arrest -- in order to be able to pick up his credentials.

Constitutional Balance

The trial of a total of 12 separatists for their part in the secessionist campaign in 2017 began in Madrid in February.

While pro-independence Catalans claim Spain is using the trial to crush a legitimate independence movement, the government says it shows the rule of law responding to an illegal attack on Spain’s constitutional order. Prosecutors are seeking a 25-year sentence for Junqueras, the highest-ranking of the secessionists in the dock at the Supreme Court.

Sanchez is doing all he can to counter the bid by the pro-independence movement to present the Spanish state as an oppressor that wants to lock up Junqueras and the other “political prisoners.”

“We have to do some educational work in Europe against the lies of secessionism,” Josep Borrell, the Catalan-born acting foreign minister who is standing for election to the European Parliament, in an interview with El Mundo. “The independence movement is a real army of agitation and propaganda, every day and everywhere.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Charles Penty in Madrid at cpenty@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, ;Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson, Jerrold Colten

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.