The Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory, Félix Bolaños, stated this Wednesday that Carles Puigdemont is “closer” to being accountable to Spanish justice after the decision of the General Court of the European Union. “Mr. Puigdemont’s clock was stopped in 2017”, said Bolaños, to add immediately that the former president “has been turned away from both the European Parliament and the European justice and the Spanish justice”, but “above all and most importantly”, he said, Catalan society, which bets on “looking to the future and not to the past”.
Coinciding with the judgment of the General Court of the European Union, the other former president of the government protagonist of the process, Mariano Rajoy, claimed the application of article 155 of the Constitution. In an interview with Cope, Rajoy responded to Pedro Sánchez who has defended the strategy of dialogue to leave behind what happened in 2017.
According to Rajoy, “the most useful thing” for the pacification of Catalonia was the application of 155, which served “to stop those who went against the Constitution”. Thanks to the 155, he said, “independenceists found out that the Constitution has instruments to defend themselves and that in case of attack they are applied”.
However, the Government and the opposition yesterday agreed on one thing, to express their satisfaction that the European justice has withdrawn Puigdemont’s immunity. From the Government, the Minister Spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, emphasized that the Government “has demanded all this time that it had to appear before the Spanish justice system and answer for the events that took place in 2017″. The resolution, he stressed, ratifies the Government’s position, protects the European institutions and endorses the resolution of the European Parliament”.
The PP, in addition to expressing its satisfaction, took the opportunity to show its conviction that Puigdemont “would also be pardoned if he depended on Sánchez”, according to the general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo.
The head of Institutional Policy of the PP, Esteban González Pons, also considers it important that the sentence has “given the right to the Spanish judges, and satisfaction to the legitimate claim of the Spanish citizens”.
From Sumar, its spokesman, Ernest Urtasun, stressed that “dialogue and de-judicialization” must be the line to follow to improve the situation in Catalonia. For Sumar, “political problems are solved with politics”, as has happened, he said, “thanks to the dialogue table promoted by the current Executive, with which “things have gone better”, since “the Generalitat and the Government are talking to each other again”.
