Do we like them?

Do we like Carles Puigdemont?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A politician who paid a heavy price for his cause and has no harmful words of his own on record, but a thinly checked record and a party chasing the immigration debate.

Carles Puigdemont was born in 1962 and started reporting for a Girona paper at 16. He left university to work full time in journalism and became editor-in-chief of El Punt in 1988. In 2011 he was elected mayor of Girona, the first politician in 32 years to break the Socialist Party's hold on the city.

He became Catalan president in January 2016 and was the first to take office without swearing loyalty to the Spanish constitution. His government pushed an independence referendum that Spain's courts ruled unconstitutional, and on 27 October 2017 Catalonia declared independence. Madrid dismissed him, he was charged with rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds, and he left for Belgium.

The legal fallout has dragged on for nine years. Prosecutors told the Supreme Court in 2024 there was no cause to investigate him for terrorism over the Tsunami Democràtic protests, calling the evidence conjecture, though a National Court judge had named him as a leader of the group. A separate Russia-links case against his circle was archived in March 2025 after the Barcelona court closed it.

On the harm test, nothing turned up from him against LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet. Immigration is the live issue: he has demanded that Catalonia take over immigration powers, and accused the PP, Vox and Podemos of vetoing the transfer because, in his words, “that's how they get votes.” His party is under pressure from the far-right Aliança Catalana, so that is the space to watch, and we could not read enough of his own words to judge more.

The recent chapter is the return. After the Constitutional Court ordered the Supreme Court to apply the amnesty to the 2017 leaders, Judge Pablo Llarena lifted the arrest warrants within the hour, calling it provisional. Llarena also said the ruling does not itself declare the amnesty applicable, and Puigdemont's lawyer said he won't return until it is irreversible.

In an October interview he said he won't take the opposition leader post when he returns, saying “I could not act as such.” He said the Catalonia he left “no longer exists” and that he wants to listen to the new generations. That is a more modest note than the 2016 line he is known for, “Impossible is just an opinion.”