The former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, vindicated this Friday the unilateral declaration of independence approved by the Parliament in 2017 and called on the independence movement not to make a “rejection” of what they started to “build” before. “In the meantime, we have to make sure that everything we do do not engage in rejections or deletions of what we have begun to build six years ago, although to some it seems little and to others it seems too much,” he said in a message at X on the sixth anniversary of the symbolic declaration.
In the message, Puigdemont warned that they did not reject the declaration nor “will they reject it, no matter how many difficulties and no matter how many efforts others make to take it back,” adding that in this that six years they have ” preserved it from amnesic or devaluing drive of some.” The DUI (unilateral declaration of independence), Puigdemont said, remains “alive” if the independence movement unites “in a strategy, overcoming partisan temptations.”
For his part, the former president of the Catalan Parliament at the time of the unilateral declaration of independence, Carmen Forcadell, confided that “hopefully there will be an investiture of Pedro Sánchez,” because that would mean that Catalonia “has made a lot of national and social progress.” In an interview with Ser Catalunya, Forcadell considered that if this investiture finally takes place, it will mean that there will be “an amnesty law, that progress can be made on social issues such as reducing or correcting the deficit of fiscal, that there may be a development or transfer of Rodalies or “that we are on the way to use our own determination.”
“I am convinced that if there is an investiture, we will progress nationally and socially as a nation. And that is why I want to be this investiture,” he insisted, although he made it clear that he was not clear when the result would come, because the negotiations “did not go well.” Precisely one of the issues that these meetings -talk fell, that in the political sense of what the referendum on October 1, 2017 means, Forcadell frankly: “O1-1 is not a crime, clearly.”
“What crime was that? Against what? Against whom? The crime was committed against us, They used violence against us. But what crime are people committing by voting peacefully? Is it described? “I don’t know of any crime that says people can’t vote,” he said. In fact, although he admitted that he and other pro-independence leaders were convicted by the Supreme Court, he recalled that the European Court of Human Rights “accepted” their appeals. “We are convinced that the ECtHR will say that our trial was unfair, because there was no crime,” he said.
On October 27, six years ago, after several days of pressure and internal debates, pro-independence forces approved a unilateral declaration of independencewhich in practice had no real effects but led the Government to use article 155 of the Constitution to suspend, for the first time, the autonomy of a community.
Puigdemont’s message and Forcadell’s words on this sixth anniversary come in a very different context, amid PSOE’s negotiations on investiture of Pedro Sánchez as the President of the Government, the talks in which a unique recognition for Catalonia and a mechanism to verify the agreements were aimed, in addition to an amnesty law that the pro-independence parties almost considered closed party.
