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A year after Carles Puigdemont and half his Catalan government arrived in Brussels to start on years of exile, to continue the internationalisation of the Catalan conflict from various European capitals and to avoid the pretrial detention which judge Pablo Llarena has unjustly subjected the leaders of the independence process to, the president has returned to the Catalan government palace. To be precise, to the Saint George Room, the most noble in the palace and the one used for the most important ceremonies, like, for example, the swearing-in of presidents. Obviously, it was a virtual Puigdemont who spoke to those present via a giant screen and a connection with Brussels on the occasion of the debut of the Council for the Republic. Minister Toni Comin, also in exile in Brussels and who will accompany Puigdemont in setting up this body, did the same.

That's not the end of the special details of Puigdemont's return to the palace. So, for example, the screen which was set up in the room and from which he addressed attendees was placed just in front of a painting covered up years ago by the government (I believe it was while Artur Mas was president) which captures in oils the current king emeritus, Juan Carlos I, and a young Felipe VI, then prince of Asturias. The painting, presumably, is behind a large velvet curtain which was hung up in the middle of the wall right onto plaça Sant Jaume. Or maybe it isn't. Nobody tends to ever confirm this point. It remains curious, and also symbolic, that Felipe VI is hidden and isolated, covered in sheets, in the room he presided over alongside his father just years ago, and that president Puigdemont can, from free Belgium, speak via a screen and explain the steps being taken to move forward towards the republic.

You could well say that it's la torna, the response, to his speech on 3rd October last year. The king, absent from Catalonia, without an agenda after the incidents seen during his visits, and Puigdemont, who Spanish justice has looked for and been unable to put behind bars, responding gratefully to the applause from a Saint George Room on its feet in a gesture of unity of the kind the independence movement has been so lacking recently.

What's certain is that Puigdemont's voice and likeness were heard and seen in the government palace for the first time since 27th October last year when he appeared with his whole government to announce that he hadn't received sufficient guarantees from Mariano Rajoy that article 155 of the Constitution wouldn't be applied and, as such, calling an election was counted out and the Parliament would approve the declaration of independence of Catalonia within hours. And we know the rest.