Catalan separatist leader opts for pragmatism

After years of calling for confrontation with Madrid, Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont reached a last-minute deal Thursday to back acting prime minister Pedro Sanchez's candidate for parliament speaker.

The votes of the seven lawmakers of Puigdemont's JxCat party were crucial to elect Socialist Francina Armengol as the assembly's new speaker following an inconclusive July 23 general election.

Sanchez now hopes he will win JxCat's support as well in a investiture vote -- which determines who forms the next government -- expected next month although experts warn those talks will be more complicated.

JxCat backed Armengol even though Sanchez's Socialist party had made it clear it would not meet the Catalan party's demands for an independence referendum and amnesty for those involved in a failed 2017 secession bid.

Puigdemont, 60, headed the regional government of Catalonia when it staged a referendum banned by Madrid on October 1, 2017, which was followed by a short-lived declaration of independence.

The JxCat leader fled Spain shortly after to avoid prosecution and now lives in Belgium.

He wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that the deal reached over the speaker post "cannot, in any way, be linked to the upcoming investiture" vote in parliament.

Puigdemont also admitted that the deal "will not seem much" to some of his supporters.

During the July polls, neither the left nor the right won enough seats to constitute a working majority of 176 representatives -- with each side only able to amass the cross-party support of 171 lawmakers.

That has put JxCat in an influential position, with the votes cast by its seven lawmakers on Thursday proving decisive to secure Armengol's election.

Puigdemont's about-face did not go unnoticed in Catalonia, especially by the wealthy northeastern region's other major independence party, the more moderate ERC which leads the regional government.

The ERC has faced criticism from some segments of the Catalan independence movement for being open to agreements with Spain's central government after the failed secession bid.

"You will have to explain very well then why, when the ERC negotiated with the Spanish government, it was 'rolling out a red carpet' and now that JxCat does it, it is ok," top ERC official Joan Margall wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The ERC's seven lawmakers also voted in favour of Armengol, who headed the regional government of the Balearic Islands, where Catalan is widely spoken, between 2015-2023.

JxCat said the agreement with the Socialists and their radical leftist ally Sumar had agreed to four demands in exchange for its support for Armengol's candidacy.

It said the agreement involved recognition of Catalan as an official EU language and the use of Catalan in Spain's parliament.

The agreement also involved the creation of two inquiry panels into the 2017 Barcelona terror attacks and the use of Pegasus software to spy on Catalan separatists.

The 2017 attacks which claimed 16 lives took place just a few weeks before the Catalan regional government pushed ahead with an independence referendum in defiance of a court ban.

It later emerged that the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Abdelbaki Es Satty, a Moroccan imam in the city of Ripoll, was an informant for the Spanish intelligence services.

Some pro-independence Catalans have maintained that Spanish intelligence services knew about the plans of the cell that carried out the attack but failed to act in a bid to destabilise Catalonia before a crucial independence vote.

The ties between Es Satty and the Spanish intelligence services "must be clarified" as well as if "state apparatuses had information about the attack and clarify why they could not be avoided," JxCat said in a statement.