German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, in an article entitled "Risen from the dead behind bars" (in German), asks whether Carles Puigdemont let himself be arrested in Germany to internationalise the Catalan conflict, because in their opinion it's successfully doing so. "Politically, nothing better could have happened to him than his arrest," they write.
"One wonders now why Puigdemont didn't take more care this time. During the forbidden referendum he changed car in a tunnel, thus giving the police helicopter the slip and voting. Later, he successfully fled via Marseilles to Brussels."
According to Der Spiegel, Puigdemont even knew that the Renault Espace he was travelling in was under surveillance by the Spanish secret service: "two months earlier his security people had, according to Spanish media reports, already found a tracking device in the car". "So did Puigdemont accept his arrest in Germany", they ask, "there's no proof of it. But the arrest hasn't worsened his political situation".
They argue that, after his detention, Puigdemont has not only become the leader of the independence movement again, but is also internationalising the issue. "Many had already written him off, now Carles Puigdemont is the hero of Catalan separatists again. Politically, nothing better could have happened to him than his arrest," they say.
The report notes that the new stage of the conflict is Germany: "Whether Angela Merkel wants [it] or not, the German government will decide on Puigdemont's fate and a bit on Catalonia's too. It can't keep out of it any longer. Exactly what Puigdemont had been working on for months". They say that in this way it's become a European debate, which "was always the Catalans' aim".
