BRUSSELS: The fight between Spain and Catalonia’s separatists reached a Belgian judge Sunday after the region’s deposed leader and four ex-ministers surrendered in Brussels to face possible extradition to Madrid for allegedly plotting a rebellion.
Hours after former Catalan regional president Carles Puigdemont and the others turned themselves in to Belgian authorities, Puigdemont’s party put him forward as its leader for an upcoming regional election called by the Spanish government. The choice means he could end up heading a campaign from Brussels while he fights a forced return to Spain.
Belgian judicial authorities now have to make a decision rife with diplomatic implications for fellow European Union members Spain and Belgium and political consequences for Catalonia, the restive Spanish region fighting Madrid for independence.
The five Catalan politicians who fled to Belgium after Spanish authorities removed them from office on Oct. 28 were taken into custody Sunday on European arrest warrants issued after they failed to show up in Madrid for questioning.
A Belgian investigative judge had 24 hours after their voluntary surrenders — 9:17 a.m. local time on Monday — to decide whether to jail them or let them free in Belgium while the extradition process takes it course.
The judge also has the option of not detaining them but imposing conditions on their freedom, such as orders to remain in Belgium, Deputy Public Prosecutor Gilles Dejemeppe told The Associated Press.
Dejemeppe said the extradition process could take more than 60 days, well past the Dec. 21 date set for the regional election in Catalonia.
Spanish government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo has said that any politician can run in the election unless he or she has been convicted of a crime.
Puigdemont and the four ex-ministers left for Belgium last week as the Spanish government, seeking to quash Catalan separatists’ escalating steps to secede, applied constitutional authority to take over running the region.
The officials said they wanted to make their voices heard in the heart of the European Union and have refused to return to Spain, alleging they could not get fair trials there.
Nine other deposed Catalan Cabinet members, however, heeded a Spanish judge’s summons for questioning in Madrid on Thursday. After questioning them, the judge ordered eight of them to jail without bail while her investigation continues. The ninth spent a night behind bars before posting bail and being released.
Whether in Brussels or Barcelona, Puigdemont is at the heart of political jockeying for position to start a campaign that promises to be as bitter as it is decisive to Spain’s worst institutional crisis in nearly four decades.
While parties try to rally support to win back control of Catalonia’s regional parliament, pro-secession parties are debating whether or not to form one grand coalition for the upcoming ballot.
Another former president of the region, Artur Mas, told Catalan public television on Sunday that he backed a fusion of parties for the December vote. Bus Mas, the first Catalan leader to harness the political momentum for secession, said the main goals of secession supporters must be recovering self-rule and the release of the jailed separatists.
“If we add the issue of independence, we won’t get as many people to support us,” Mas said.
An opinion poll published by Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper Sunday forecasts a tight election between parties for and against Catalonia ending the region’s century-old ties to the rest of Spain.
The poll predicts that pro-secession parties would win between 66-69 seats. They won 72 two years ago. Sixty-eight seats are needed for a majority.
Puigdemont and his fellow separatists claim that a referendum on secession held on Oct. 1 gives them a mandate for independence, even though it had been prohibited by the nation’s highest court, polled only 43 percent of the electorate, failed to meet international standards and was disrupted by violent police raids.
Catalonia’s Parliament voted in favor of a declaration of independence on Oct. 27. The next day, Spain’s central government used the extraordinary constitutional powers to fire Catalonia’s government, take charge of its administrations, dissolve its parliament and call the December election.
Hundreds of pro-secession Catalans gathered in towns across the region Sunday.
“We want to send a message to Europe that even if our president is still in Brussels and all our government now is in Madrid jailed, that the independence movement still didn’t finish, protester Adria Ballester, 24, said in Barcelona.
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Joseph Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Nebi Qena contributed to this story from Barcelona. Alex Furtula contributed from Barcelona.
Belgian judge to decide next phase in Spain-Catalonia fight
Belgian judge to decide next phase in Spain-Catalonia fight
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
