Puigdemont’s Catalan circus comes to Brussels

Chaos and confusion as ousted president takes the stage.

Carles Puigdemont, before his press conference at the Press Club in Brussels | Nicolas Maeterlinck/AFP via Getty Images

Carles Puigdemont received the ultimate Belgian welcome: good-humored total chaos.

Demonstrators both for and against Catalan independence lined the entrance to the Brussels Press Club in the city’s EU district on Tuesday, anticipating Puigdemont’s first public appearance since his surprise switch from Barcelona to Belgium. The protesters waved Catalan and Spanish flags, the EU’s 12-star banner and signs that included “Not in my Name. Long live Spain.”

More than 300 journalists waited more than an hour, crammed into a space designed for 80, giving the place the feel of a music festival or sweaty nightclub floor. A dozen Belgian police stood by outside to keep the peace, but no one checked who came and went from the press club, leading to pandemonium inside.

At one point Griselda Pastor, a diminutive Spanish radio journalist, tried in vain to keep a path clear for Puigdemont to arrive. Journalists joked that the Catalan ex-president would need to be passed above their heads — rock-concert style — in order to reach the podium. Glastonbury was set to come to Brussels.

While some Catalans may be wondering if Puigdemont had abandoned them, by 12:40 p.m. the assembled journalists had begun to wonder the same thing.

Order prevailed in the final moments before Puigdemont arrived, 45 minutes late. It took the ample form of the press club’s president who shouted “My middle name is Moses, so move!”

Then security arrived, dressed improbably in a camel-colored cashmere coat and blue pinstripe flannel suit. A private bodyguard? A spy? It was impossible to know; the man declined to identify himself. But he declared himself satisfied and then Puigdemont — the rock star of Brussels’ quiet school holiday week — arrived.

With Puigdemont mobbed by aggressive photo and TV journalists, his six fellow fugitive ex-ministers were all but forgotten in the chaos: wedged between the photographers and the print journalists. They took several minutes to join him on stage, left to adjust their hair as the cameras rolled. No matter. The press club president had forgotten to turn on the sound. He used the time to flee the stage so that finally the one-ring Catalan circus could begin.

As Puigdemont began in French, a Francophone journalist unhappy with the quality of his French shouted: “Do it in Spanish!”

In fact, he did it in four languages — Catalan, Spanish, French and English.

He said he would not attempt to claim asylum in Belgium. Perhaps the chaos scared him off.

As his entourage left in three taxis, a group of Spaniards demonstrating for Catalonia to remain part of Spain turned nasty: “Coward!” they shouted.

Tags: