ARTUR MAS spent five years as president of Catalonia leading its drive for independence but, for the most part, he was a pro-business centrist who embraced the cause of secession because politics demanded it. When Mr Mas stepped down on January 9th after three months attempting to form a government, it was to make way for a more ideologically pure successor, Carles Puigdemont. In a speech in 2013 Mr Puigdemont said, quoting a Catalan journalist executed under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, that “the invaders will be expelled from Catalonia”—referring to the Spanish government.

On January 12th Mr Puigdemont became the first Catalan president to take the oath of office while omitting the traditional vows of loyalty to Spain’s constitution and king. Spain’s interior minister looked on in stony silence.

It was Mr Puigdemont’s long commitment to independence, which much of his centre-right Catalan Democratic Convergence (CDC) party has embraced only recently, that enabled him to form a government where Mr Mas had failed. It won him the trust of the far-left Popular Unity Candidacies (CUP) party, whose members thought Mr Mas a sleazy austerity-monger but apparently consider Mr Puigdemont a more trustworthy radical.

Three months after the elections, Catalonia’s independence movement now has control of the region’s government. But that control has come at a cost to the secessionists’ image. For years, the separatist movement has successfully sold itself as cool, kind and progressive. Backers of continued union with Spain were scorned as reactionaries, or even the inheritors of Franco’s legacy. Now senior members of the independence movement worry that it will be identified with the CUP, whose raised fists and chaotic assemblies frighten conservative, middle-class Catalans. Mr Puigdemont’s CDC has traditionally stood for order. The small but newly powerful CUP represents radical change.

Separatism’s squeaky-clean image has found its greatest expression in pro-independence demonstrations on Catalan national day, September 11th. For each of the past four years, at least 600,000 people, or around 10% of the population, have turned out to demonstrate. The good-natured protests pull in entire families, with small children holding grandparents’ hands, banners in the red, gold and blue colours of the independence movement flying—“and not a single piece of litter on the street”, claims Jordi Sánchez, president of the Catalan National Assembly, the group that organises the festivities.

Unionists complain that separatism’s civilised facade hides an unpleasant sense of moral superiority. “I call it the Kumbaya factor,” moans an anti-separatist Catalan economist. The movement’s righteous aura is aided by the participation of several nuns. One radical crowd-pleaser is Teresa Forcades, a Benedictine with a master’s degree from Harvard who is on leave from her convent on Catalonia’s Montserrat holy mountain. Mr Mas liked to be seen with one of his greatest fans, a Dominican nun named Lucía Caram.

According to the coalition accord, Mr Puigdemont will now lead the Catalan government on an 18-month “road map” to independence. Yet Spain’s constitution does not allow any move towards secession, nor are there plans for a referendum on it. The acting government in Madrid, led by Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party (PP), has vowed to apply the full weight of the law as soon as it sees the constitution under threat.

The question is whether Catalans will support an avowedly confrontational government. Mr Mas billed the regional elections as the referendum on independence that Madrid had refused to call. His Together for Yes coalition and CUP, which both backed the road map, jointly won more than half the seats—but only 48% of the vote. Even many separatists doubt that is enough. The ugly infighting of recent weeks and the radical antics of CUP are unlikely to have boosted support any further.

The separatists’ ranks have swollen dramatically over the past half-dozen years. This has been the result, in part, of Mr Rajoy’s refusal to concede any Catalan demands for greater self-government. Most important, says Mr Sánchez, it is younger voters who are keenest on independence. That bodes well for the future of separatism. Much depends on how the central government in Madrid responds. Unfortunately, Spain’s general election on December 20th left parliament so fractured that forming a government could take months, or require new elections. Catalonia may have a new president, but the question of its independence is not much closer to being resolved.