In a low-key ceremony in the Catalan parliament on Saturday, Spain’s former health minister Salvador Illa was sworn in as the new president of Catalonia. Despite coming first in the regional elections on 12 May, Illa’s Socialists failed to secure a majority and have spent the last three months in cross-party negotiations. They finally struck a deal with the pro-independence ERC, which came third in the May election after losing 13 of its 33 seats.
Illa is the first unionist politician to become president of Catalonia since 2010, so there has been a lot of talk in Spanish media of a ‘nueva etapa’, or new era – a chance for Catalans to move on from the independence-related upheavals of recent years. Illa, himself a Catalan, has promised that his coalition will be ‘an institution for all Catalans… in [the] service of everyone’. Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez, under whom Illa served as health minister during the pandemic, has said that Illa is ‘exactly
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