Carles Puigdemont: ‘The realistic vision is the intelligent management of the confrontation with the state’

The Catalan Summer University of Prada de Conflent (UCE) is held this year in conditions of resistance, as recalled by the President of the UCE in the presentation of the event. That’s why only about thirty people, basically about twenty prominent positions of Together for Catalonia and a dozen journalists, were able to follow live an event, the president’s conference Carles Puigdemont, which like all this year’s events have been done online. Carles Puigdemont warns Spain that it has lost judicially in Europe and it is time to negotiate.

On the balcony that gives access to thehostel Pau Casals, President Puigdemont has answered the question of whether independence is disabled or not, that this was the title of the conference.

He began in an extremely cautious manner, saying he did not want his words to be interpreted as responses to any recent controversy.

He has said that all attempts by the state to disable political and social leadership had failed. And he gave the example ofOriol Junqueras, Marta Rovira, himself Jordi Sànchez i Jordi Cuixart, the fact that they have not given up their projects, to emphasize that the beheading process planned and verbalized by Soraya Sáenz de Santamaria had failed. In his opinion, this is not the only thing, but three years later it can be said that the Spanish state has ‘failed in its goal of doubling the will for independence’.

However, Puigdemont also acknowledged that the repression ‘has left gaps’ and side effects among independence. But he added that this does not necessarily last: ‘Where there is disorientation there can be guidance, where there is division there can be unity,’ he said.

From here, he said that three years later it is clear that the Spanish state cannot deactivate the independence process because ‘deactivating independence is only in our hands’. Comparing figures, he recalled that today, amid the pain and repression unleashed by the Spanish state, more than twice as many people support independence as when the process began.

Based on this and the fact that, according to him, no negotiating platform for self-determination will ever emerge from Spain, Puigdemont has asked himself two questions. The first is ‘if we want to disable independence’ and the second if ‘we do enough’. And then he proposed what he considers the only realistic way: ‘intelligent management of the confrontation with the state’.

He called for abandoning fatalism and planning a confrontation with Spain, which recent experience indicates cannot be carried out only in institutional and democratic terms, as most citizens of Catalonia would like, he said.

Puigdemont has focused the organization of this response on the role that should play the Council for the Republic and he has said the state will not be able to stop it: ‘If to this day it has failed to bend us, it is because this is beyond its reach.’

In the turn of answers to the questions that have sent him the students of the UCE, Puigdemont has said, on the Catalan Countries, that it was necessary to respect the majority will of each territory, but has also added, for the first time, that it is surely there will be parts of the country that will ask to join the Catalan republic when it is recognized and that this must also be respected.