The acting President of the Catalan Government, Pere Aragonès, this morning led the Catalan Government’s institutional reception for the exiles who arrived in Catalonia on Friday and assured that their return “is a great victory for the country, not the last or the definitive one that we will achieve, but a great victory for the country”.

In the same vein, Pere Aragonès recalled that this process “must culminate in the end of ineligibility and the return of President Puigdemont and ministers Comín and Puig”.He also stated that “the road travelled should not only be a milestone to put an end to the repression”, but “it should be a turning point to take a step forward in the resolution of the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain, which is a conflict of sovereignty”.

Pere Aragonès, accompanied by members of the Catalan Government, pointed out that now “a new political scenario is being generated”, and he expressed his conviction that “if we resolve the sovereignty conflict, establishing democratic mechanisms so that all the political options that exist in Catalonia, if they have the support of the majority of the country’s citizens, can move forward, this will be the great victory”.

“What Tsunami Democràtic advocated in 2019 in the streets, which was to sit down and talk, has been the path that a majority here and there has taken in order to definitively resolve the conflict on the basis of democracy and freedom,” the President remarked.

Pere Aragonès also noted that “this term can be said to have put an end to repression”. And he recalled the pardons, “which allowed the release of political prisoners”, the reform of the Penal Code, with the suppression of the crime of sedition, and the amnesty, which “is the culmination that should, in the coming weeks and months, allow the repression against the independence movement to come to a definitive end”.