Could Carles Puigdemont smuggle himself into the Catalan parliament dressed as a lion?
Probably not, but police in Barcelona are taking no chances as they try and stop the separatist leader from going ahead with his threat to sneak into Spain and be in the Catalan parliament when it votes on a new regional president on Thursday.
As POLITICO reported, Puigdemont wants to return to Spain even though he faces immediate arrest. He took to social media Wednesday to make his plan public, saying of the vote in the parliament: “I have to be there and I want to be there. That is why I have embarked on the return journey from exile.”
The Mossos d’Esquadra — Catalonia’s autonomous police force — has been tasked with making sure that doesn’t happen.
The neoclassical Palace of the Catalan Parliament is located within the 31-hectare Parc de la Ciutadella. To keep Puigdemont out, only one entrance to the park will be open, and only accredited members of the parliament and their staff will be allowed to enter.
As part of the security operation, police are also carrying out a room-by-room search of the parliament. Emulating the royal guards who searched the bowels of London’s Palace of Westminster to seize Guy Fawkes and the piles of explosives with which he sought to blow up the House of Lords in 1605, Catalan police have been sent into the basement of the nearly 400-year-old Catalan parliament building to ensure no one is hiding down there.
They have also searched the sewers, and agents have sealed a door that connects the parliament — a formal arsenal and royal palace — with the Barcelona Zoo, which surrounds the building on three sides. The closest animal enclosures to the parliament contain impalas, porcupines and — perhaps fittingly — hyenas.
“These are standard security procedures that are carried out before any investiture ceremony,” a spokesperson for the Mossos d’Esquadra told POLITICO.
But the spokesperson admitted that if officers were to encounter someone with an outstanding arrest warrant in their name — as is the case with Puigdemont — they would “evidently” be obliged to take them into custody.
“Our duty is to enforce the law,” the spokesperson said.
Puigdemont’s planned return after seven years in self-declared exile in Belgium has Spain talking. Pundits on radio and television talk shows have spent the week drawing up fanciful scenarios, with some insisting that the politician will attempt to sneak into the parliament in disguise and others suggesting he could attempt to evade police by landing on the building’s roof in a hot air balloon.
Puigdemont famously fled Spain after authorities ordered his detention for organizing an illegal independence referendum in 2017, and despite the passage of a controversial amnesty bill last May, the warrant for his arrest remains active.
The separatist politician declined to stand in June’s European election in order to make a bid for the Catalan presidency, hoping to stage a triumphant return to the region he had fled seven years earlier. But Socialist candidate Salvador Illa scored the most votes and last week struck a deal that will allow him to form a minority government.
Puigdemont’s determination to make it to Thursday’s investiture session is based on his theory that he’ll be able to shame other lawmakers in the parliament into backing out of their deal with Illa. While his arrest would likely delay the vote on the Illa’s leadership, enough lawmakers have said that they’ll back him anyway.
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