World / Europe

Nine years out, and Puigdemont can finally come home

A Supreme Court judge has confirmed the arrest warrant is gone, so the Catalan leader who fled Spain in 2017 can return without being detained. The amnesty itself is still undecided, and an early election is six weeks away.

Barcelona, Spain · October 19, 2026

Carles Puigdemont can come home. On Monday, Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena confirmed that the arrest warrant against the former Catalan president is withdrawn, rejecting an appeal by the far right Vox party and upholding his own decision of October 6. Nearly nine years after Puigdemont fled Spain to escape prosecution over a failed independence bid, nothing now stops him crossing the border as a free man.

The exile began in October 2017, when his regional government held an independence referendum that Madrid had declared illegal and then declared independence anyway. Spain imposed direct rule on Catalonia, and Puigdemont left for Belgium, where he has lived ever since. His one known return, in August 2024, was a brief speech to supporters in Barcelona followed by a disappearance that left police hunting for a man who was already gone. This time nobody will be hunting.

The legal path here ran through the amnesty law Spain passed in 2024. The law was the price of a 2023 deal: Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stayed in power with backing from Catalan parties, including Puigdemont's own Junts, and the separatists prosecuted over 2017 got an amnesty in return. The Supreme Court first read the law narrowly, holding that it did not cover the embezzlement charges tied to the referendum money. The Constitutional Court disagreed, ruling that embezzlement unconnected to private enrichment falls inside the amnesty, and Llarena has now accepted that reading as binding, while making clear he still thinks it is wrong.

Cleared to return is not the same as cleared. Llarena stressed that Monday's decision concerns only the arrest warrants, which also covered former Catalan ministers Antoni Comin and Lluis Puig. Whether Puigdemont is formally granted amnesty, and whether the criminal case against him is dismissed, is a separate decision for the Supreme Court's criminal chamber. Puigdemont, speaking from Waterloo in Belgium after the October 6 rulings, called them a victory that, in his words, "obliges us to put an end to political repression". He has given no date for a return.

The timing is what turns a court story into a political one. Spain votes in an early general election on November 29, called by Sanchez after his housing measures failed in parliament, and Puigdemont's possible homecoming lands in the middle of the campaign. Junts secretary general Jordi Turull has ruled out Puigdemont standing in the election, and Junts withdrew its support from Sanchez's government a year after the amnesty deal, which limits what either side can gain from a reunion photo. What a return would do is remind every voter, six weeks out, of the bargain that kept Sanchez in office and of the question Spain has never settled: what to do with a region where a large share of people voted to leave.