On Tuesday, in Madrid, two courts moved in sequence and a door that has been shut for nine years swung open. First the Constitutional Court ruled that Spain’s amnesty law for Catalan separatists applies to the embezzlement charge against Carles Puigdemont; then a Supreme Court judge lifted the warrant for his arrest. Puigdemont, the self-exiled Catalan separatist leader, [can now come home to Spain, Al Jazeera reported](<https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/6/catalan-separatist-leader-puigdemont-to-return-home-after-warrant-lifted>), without fear of being arrested at the border he once slipped across in the night.
One caution first, because in cases like these the headline always runs ahead of the file. As [the Anadolu news agency notes](<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/spain-lifts-arrest-warrant-for-catalan-separatist-leader-puigdemont/4079731>), the decision clears the way for the return but does not finalize the amnesty in his case. The machinery of Spanish justice has closed on Puigdemont before; it may yet creak and grind again.
The flight
Nine years ago, in the autumn of 2017, Puigdemont ran his independence bid for Catalonia, lost, and fled the country. [As Reuters recounts](<https://www.reuters.com/world/court-ruling-clears-key-hurdle-separatist-leader-puigdemonts-return-spain-2026-10-06>), several of his former ministers stayed behind and were jailed while he rebuilt his political life abroad. Since then he has existed in that strange condition reserved for defeated revolutionaries: a president without a state, a fugitive who gives press conferences, a man history forgot to bury.
Redemption, when it came, came not from the rebels’ own hand but from the arithmetic of coalition politics in Madrid. Parliament passed an amnesty law for Catalan separatists. Last year the Constitutional Court upheld its core elements, and — [according to Deutsche Welle](<https://www.dw.com/en/spain-court-lifts-puigdemont-arrest-warrant-clearing-way-for-his-return-home-ahead-of-november-elections/a-79565853>) — around 400 separatists have benefited from it. Everyone, that is, except the most famous name on the list. Spain’s Supreme Court had ruled the law did not apply to those accused of embezzlement, and the judge handling Puigdemont’s case held to that line.
The turning of the wheel
What changed on Tuesday was an appeal brought by one of Puigdemont’s own: Dolors Bassa, a former Catalan minister, had challenged the refusal to apply the amnesty. The Constitutional Court sided with her, and the reasoning cascaded downhill to Puigdemont’s file. The warrant that had hung over him across Europe was lifted the same day.
There is an irony here that the dead of old civil wars would recognise. Power in Madrid has long depended on the votes of the separatists it once prosecuted. Puigdemont’s Junts party withdrew its support from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez last year, DW reports, accusing him of failing to fulfil promises — among them amnesty for its leader. The pardon was never entirely an act of mercy; it was the currency of a coalition, spent reluctantly, in instalments.
And so the exile prepares to return ahead of November’s elections, to a Spain that has changed and has not changed. Amnesty is the oldest transaction between rulers and the ruled: the state admits it cannot punish forever, and the punished admit they cannot win. What remains after the papers are signed is harder to forgive than any charge on a warrant — the memory, on both sides, of the autumn when Catalonia tried to leave.