The registered membership of the Council of the Republic, the exile-based Catalan body chaired by Carles Puigdemont, has decided that the independence movement should blockade the investiture of the next Spanish prime minister. This is the result of the internal consultation promoted by a member of the Council which achieved a turnout of only 4.45% - 4,021 of the 90,484 registered members that the body has - but which had a clear result: 74.9% of the voters pronounced in favour, with 24.9% against.
The question put to the Council's rank and file members was: "Should the Council of the Republic promote the blockading of the investiture of the Spanish prime minister by the Catalan pro-independence parties?" The consultation has taken place in the middle of negotiations on the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, through talks in which Puigdemont has assumed a leading role as the representative of Together for Catalonia (Junts).
The decision is for the parties
The Council has informed its affiliates that it will immediately transmit the opinion expressed in the vote to the pro-independence parties and it will be the political groups, and their members, who will decide the vote of each party before Sánchez's investiture. So far, the Council has the recognition of Junts, while the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) does not hide its reluctance on the issue and the Popular Unity Candidature (CUP) maintains its distance, although there is a member from the CUP-component party Poble Lliure on the Council.
The spokeperson for the Council, Toni Castellà, in an interview with ElNacional.cat, at the beginning of October, took a position against "blocking for the sake of blocking" and asserted that it does not make much sense to hold this kind of consultation "before any type of negotiation", but rather, once the proposed deal has been closed. In this regard, Castellà recalled that the Council had already refused to back an abstention campaign in the last Spanish general election. "The only sense in running for elections in Madrid is if we use the Spanish institutions to make decisions that lead to progress towards the goal of independence," Castellà assured in that interview.
The Council of the Republic, the body set up in 2018 by Carles Puigdemont and the exiled pro-independence Catalan politicians to lead the independence struggle from outside the Spanish state, allows consultations to be made at the request of any of the affiliates, as long as they manage to collect a minimum required number of signatures. In line with this, at the beginning of October, a group of members, critical to the current policies of the Council, also initiated a grassroots vote on the restructuring reform of the Council proposed by the Puigdemont leadership, which intended to replace the Council's Assembly of Representatives with two new chambers. That consultation endorsed Puigdemont's proposal with 76.5% of votes, although also with a very low turnout: 6.53% of eligible voters.