Carles Puigdemont has said he will continue to campaign for a sovereign Catalan republic from his self-imposed exile in Belgium, after a Spanish court dropped an international arrest warrant under which he was detained by police in Germany in March.

The former Catalan president, who fled to Brussels last October after being sacked by the Spanish government for holding an illegal referendum and subsequently making a unilateral declaration of independence, said he would resume his efforts when he returned to Belgium this weekend.

Although he is still subject to a Spanish arrest warrant on charges of rebellion and misuse of public funds, the former president said he did not intend to remain abroad indefinitely.

“I don’t know if it’ll be 20 years before I set foot on Spanish soil again, but what I do know is that I won’t wait 20 years to return to Catalan soil,” he said at a press conference in Berlin on Wednesday.

Asked about Spain’s new Socialist government, which has offered to hold talks to try to resolve the Catalan crisis, Puigdemont said he had seen “a change on style, climate and language”. But he said it was time for “deeds, not gestures” on the independence issue.

Catalonia is more or less equally split over the question of sovereignty. Although 90% of those who voted in October’s unilateral referendum cast their ballots in favour of independence, turnout was 42% because the poll was boycotted by many of those wishing to remain part of Spain.

Although pro-independence parties retained their parliamentary majority in December’s regional election, winning 47.7% of the vote, the single party that took the most seats was the staunchly anti-independence Citizens party.

Puigdemont continues to insist he has a mandate for seeking independence. “The decision of the Catalan people to become an independent republic is a fact,” he said.

“I’ll go back to Belgium this Saturday … where we have to begin to work for the republic and so that’s why I intend to stay in Belgium. Obviously I intend to carry on with the people’s mandate, to work for my colleagues who are still unjustly imprisoned [in Spain] and to try to get back to normal in my own life, too.”

The ousted leader said the Spanish constitution could yet provide a way out of the impasse if the Madrid government was prepared to consider a mutually agreed independence referendum.

But the constitution is based on the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation [and] the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards”, and the new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, is adamant that the right to self-determination does not exist within it.

Puigdemont’s successor as Catalan president, the hardline nationalist Quim Torra, has vowed to seek a Scottish-style referendum. Although a recent poll in the Catalan newspaper El Periódico showed only 21.5% of Catalans wanted an independent republic, while 62% favoured increased self-government, Torra believes the issue must be put to the vote.

Divisions in the independence movement have opened up since Puigdemont fled Spain and his vice-president, Oriol Junqueras, was taken into custody, where he remains.

On Sunday Puigdemont’s centre-right Catalan Democratic party (PDeCat) elected his preferred candidate, David Bonvehí, as its new leader and voted for the creation of a Catalan republic “as soon as possible”. PDeCat’s more moderate former leader, Marta Pascal, had stepped down the day before, saying she did not have Puigdemont’s confidence.

With Torra in office and Sánchez demonstrating a far more conciliatory approach to the Catalan question than his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy, some believe that Puigdemont is fighting to maintain his status.

“An antagonistic approach might be the only way for [him] to remain relevant politically given that he is unlikely to come back to Spain any time soon,” said Antonio Barroso, an analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence.

Puigdemont’s comments received short shrift from the leader of the Catalan branch of the Citizens party, Inés Arrimadas, who said he had always had a problem with “dates and reality”.

She told the Spanish news agency Efe: “Puigdemont hasn’t stopped lying since he became president. He promised Catalan independence in 18 months and that was a lie. He said he’d stay in Catalonia and then he fled, leaving even his own colleagues in the lurch. He said he’d come back to Catalonia after the election and he didn’t. I give Puigdemont’s repeated lies less and less attention and credibility as time goes on.”

Spain’s supreme court dropped the international arrest warrant last week after a German court said it would extradite Puigdemont only over the alleged misuse of public funds rather than the more serious charge of rebellion.

The court’s refusal to extradite Puigdemont on the rebellion charge meant the deposed president could not be tried for the offence if sent back to Spain.