You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Catalan Parliament Elects Pro-Independence Candidate as President

HeadlineMay 15, 2018

The Catalan Parliament has elected a pro-independence MP as president, seven months after Spain took direct control of Catalonia following its independence referendum.

Roger Torrent: “Sixty-six votes yes, 65 votes no, and four abstentions. Mr. Quim Torra has had 66 votes, which means he has achieved a simple majority and, according to Article 4.4, is elected president of Catalonia’s Generalitat.”

Quim Torra will now succeed former Catalonia President Carles Puigdemont, who is in exile in Berlin, where he awaits a German court’s decision on whether to extradite him to Spain on charges of rebellion. Other members of Puigdemont’s administration have been imprisoned on charges of rebellion and misuse of public funds for having organized the independence referendum, which sparked the biggest constitutional crisis in Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s.

Topics:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top