Puigdemont will deliver his rallies in France and calls on his followers to come and support him

Carles Puigdemont feed the staging of his gradual return to Catalonia by holding all his electoral campaign rallies in the south of France, instead of doing it telematically through large screens installed throughout the Catalan territory, as has been happening in all the elections in which Junts has participated since its leader’s escape abroad.

“The screens are over,” they maintain from Junts, which will charter half a dozen buses a day from different points in Catalonia so that Puigdemont’s faithful can procession to the French town of Argiers, where Puigdemont’s interventions will take place daily. Only at the final campaign rally, which will take place in Barcelona, ​​will the candidate intervene virtually.

The neoconvergents defend the idea that Puigdemont will preach from the Catalonia North, since that is how the independence movement considers border France. Also from there, specifically from Perpignan, the fugitive wants TV3 to broadcast the 12-M electoral debate, despite the fact that, for the moment, only the ERC candidate, Pere Aragons, has declared himself willing to go abroad to confront Puigdemont in front of the cameras. The presidential candidate of the PSC and the main contender for victory according to the polls, Salvador Illa, has already ruled out participating in debates that take place outside of Catalonia. And the PP, Ciudadanos or Vox have done the same.

Puigdemont has focused his personal campaign on recounting in chapters how and when his return to Catalonia will take place to be “reinstated” as president of the Generalitat after he was deposed from office in 2017 in application of article 155 of the Constitution. Thus, he confirmed from the French town of Elna that he would be a candidate, and last week he announced that he was leaving Belgium and his mansion in Waterloo (which he baptized as the House of the Republic to pretend that he was still ruling from abroad) to settle in the French region of Vallespir, 30 kilometers from Spain.

On Tuesday he specified that he would return to Catalonia coinciding with the investiture debate, whether or not he had the option of being the one anointed as president. He also announced that, if he cannot be elected as the new head of the Catalan Executive, he will abandon active politics. He did it with the obvious purpose of trying to concentrate the separatist vote in his figure to be the most voted secessionist candidate and to claim his right to become the new president of the Generalitat.