Puigdemont's return to a transformed Catalonia

Carles Puigdemont is coming home. After nearly nine years abroad, the former Catalan president stands on the threshold of return. Spain's constitutional court is expected to rule this week—October 6, 2026—that the final legal charge against him, a misuse of public funds allegation, falls under the amnesty law passed by the Spanish government in 2024. If the court decides as anticipated, Puigdemont will be free to step back into Catalonia without fear of arrest, ending a self-imposed exile that began in 2017 when he fled to avoid prison for his role in the failed independence referendum. Nine of his colleagues were sentenced to as long as 13 years; all were released within three years.

But the Catalonia he left behind has become almost unrecognizable. The political temperature has dropped dramatically. The mass demonstrations, the constant friction between Barcelona and Madrid, the sense of perpetual confrontation—all of it has cooled into something resembling cooperation. Since 2024, the region has been governed by the Socialist Party of Catalonia, the first non-nationalist government to hold power since 1980. Led by Salvador Illa, who served as Spain's health minister during the pandemic, this administration has pursued a path of negotiation with Madrid, where the Socialist Workers' Party—to which the Catalan Socialists are affiliated—also holds the national government. The era of defiant separatism has given way to pragmatic accommodation.

The young people who once fueled the independence movement with passion are older now, and their priorities have shifted. Jobs are scarce. Housing is unaffordable. Wages remain low while rents climb. Mortgages sit beyond reach for most. As a result, 82 percent of Catalans aged 18 to 30 still live with their parents. When Puigdemont's own party, Junts per Catalunya, voted down the government's progressive housing proposals last Friday, it was a choice that alienated precisely the demographic that once formed the movement's backbone—and their parents, who watch their children trapped in economic precarity.

Demography itself has transformed the region in ways that cut to the heart of what independence means. When Puigdemont fled in 2017, foreign-born residents made up 13.8 percent of Catalonia's population. Today that figure stands at 18.7 percent. In Barcelona, the shift is even more pronounced: 32 percent of the city's residents are immigrants representing 118 different nationalities. Among those aged 12 to 35, immigrants comprise half the population. This is not a marginal change. It is a fundamental reshaping of who lives in Catalonia and what identity means there.

The question of Catalan identity has become thornier as a result. Jordi Pujol, who led Catalonia from 1980 to 2003, once declared that a Catalan was anyone who lived and worked in the region—a generous, inclusive definition. That consensus has fractured. From the wreckage of the independence movement's disappointments has emerged Aliança Catalana, a far-right nationalist party whose leader has stated plainly that "there isn't room for everyone" in Catalonia. The party's positions exclude Muslims, even those born in Spain—a stance that would, by its own logic, exclude figures like Lamine Yamal, the Barcelona and Spanish national team footballer. This ethno-nationalist turn has pulled Junts, traditionally the party of Catalan business interests, further to the right, as those drawn to explicitly racist politics gravitate toward Aliança, whose positions on sovereignty barely differ from Junts' own.

Over the past quarter-century, Catalonia has ceased to be a bicultural, bilingual Catalan-Spanish society. It has become multicultural and multilingual. Puigdemont's political project rests on identity and historical grievance—the sense that Spain has treated Catalonia with contempt and abuse. That sentiment remains real for many Catalans, perhaps most. But as the region's demographic composition shifts, so does the calculus of identity itself. Immigrants who have arrived in search of opportunity or a different life carry their own identity concerns. They have no particular quarrel with Spain. Support for independence, which never reached 50 percent even at the height of the movement, now hovers in the low 40s.

As people migrate across borders in pursuit of better lives, the likelihood grows that the parents of those living in Catalonia will themselves come from different countries. Their sense of national identity becomes multiple, layered, or simply not the organizing principle of their lives. Puigdemont's lifelong ambition is to see Catalonia take its place as an independent nation-state—a project built on the assumption of a coherent, unified national identity. Yet the world he inhabited when he first pursued that dream may have already moved beyond it. The monocultural, monolingual nation-state he envisions may itself be becoming obsolete, a relic of a political order that no longer fits the reality of how people actually live.