A coward dies a thousand times

Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Julius Caesar Act II, scene 2

On 10 October 2017 Carles Puigdemont, premier of Catalonia, declared the unilateral independence of Catalonia. Eight seconds after making the declaration, he withdrew it.

The difference that eight seconds can make!

On Friday 27 October 2017 the Catalan parliament declared the unilateral independence of Catalonia. Over the weekend Puigdemont told his associates to be in their offices to start work on Monday. On Monday 30th his Instagram account posted a photo of the inside of the Catalan government building. It was an old photo. By then he was already in Brussels, having fled Spain in the boot of a car driven by a sergeant of the Mossos (Catalan police). Five associates ran away with him, leaving a dozen others, including his effective deputy Oriol Junqueras, ignorant of events and left to face the music by themselves. They are the ones who have just completed their trial in Madrid.

Since then he has been leading an increasingly isolated, ineffective and ridiculous life on the run under the official protection of the Belgian courts and the personal protection of a number of Mossos detached there on special duty on their free days. He has a mansion in Waterloo, while his financial support is murky; it may be from a private backer, or from a reptile fund under the control of the Catalan government, or a bit of both.

He got himself elected to the European Parliament and wanted to take his seat yesterday. That would have required his prior attendance in person at the Electoral Commission in Madrid to be sworn in. He didn’t go there because he would have been arrested. He is evidently not the stuff of which martyrs are made.

He bottled out again yesterday. Having announced that he would attend the opening session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and with a few thousand of his faithful acolytes in attendance, he failed to cross the Rubicon Rhine and enter France, where a Spanish arrest warrant would certainly have been executed by the French courts. Instead he stayed in Kehl on the eastern bank of the river, safe in Germany, a country where he can travel freely since the German courts take a relaxed view of anyone who runs a putsch against the democratic government of his country and rams an enabling act through parliament allowing him to overrule his country’s constitution and laws in a way to suit his personal dictatorial whimsy. Puigdemont saved his skin, or at least his personal freedom, but his followers are beginning to become disillusioned with this sort of behaviour.

In a word, Puigdemont is yellow.

 

Sources (in Spanish)

Crónica Global

El Govern rompe la prohibición de Interior y tiene a 14 'mossos' protegiendo a Puigdemont

(The Catalan government breaks the Spanish interior ministry’s ban and has 14 mossos protecting Puigdemont)

El Correo

Puigdemont insiste en llevar el pulso soberanista «hasta las últimas consecuencias»

Puigdemont insists on taking the independence showdown “to the final consequences”)

eldiario.es

La fuga de Puigdemont: su mujer, cuatro mossos y un todoterreno sin papeles

(Puigdemont’s flight: his wife, four mossos and an SUV with no papers)

Galiciapress

Un martes nada aburrido para el respetable

(Not a boring Tuesday for respectable people)