Carles Puigdemont has spent almost nine years away from Spain. With a warrant out for his arrest, he risked prison if he set foot inside the country. Holed up in Brussels after a failed Catalan independence bid in 2017, he couldn’t go home when his parents died and missed both of their funerals. Last week, however, the Supreme Court gave the president of the Together for Catalonia (Junts) party a path back when it decided to provisionally lift the warrant against him. But the Catalonia that he left behind is a far cry from the one to which he might soon return.

A stroll through downtown Barcelona offers a glimpse of the region’s changes. The Estelada – Catalonia’s starred flag, which became a fixture on balconies in the run up to the 2017 referendum – is not as prominent as it once was. The mix of languages heard on the streets reflects a population with increasingly diverse backgrounds. Today more than a third of the city’s residents were born abroad, up from about a fifth in 2016.

The demographic changes put pressure on Catalan, a language that has long served as a cornerstone of the region’s national identity. Children are still compelled to learn it at school but it can feel increasingly disconnected from everyday life. Of course, Catalonia extends far beyond its capital and, in many of its smaller towns, symbols of national identity remain prominent. But even here, the fervour for independence appears to have cooled and Madrid is no longer cast as the demon that it once was.

The focus of conversations has changed too. Only a few years ago, a night out often led to a discussion with a stranger about the merits of Catalan independence. Later the conversations turned to Brexit and the parallels – and differences – between the two movements. These days, such comparisons rarely arise. Independence hasn’t disappeared from the political landscape but it seems to have lost its place as a subject of everyday conversation.

It’s not that grievances have disappeared: Rodalies de Catalunya commuter trains still run late and the argument about Madrid’s investment in Catalonia remains unresolved. What has changed is the political response. While these failures once helped to draw hundreds of thousands to the streets under the banner of Catalan self-determination, discontent today is focused elsewhere.

To continue reading about the concerns of Catalans and what the future might hold for Puigdemont, click here.

Blake Evans-Pritchard is a Monocle contributor based in Barcelona. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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The Lufthansa Group is continuing to cement its position as Europe’s dominant player (writes Gabriel Leigh). On Wednesday, the German company announced a deal that has been years in the making: it acquired a 44.9 per cent stake in Portuguese flag carrier Tap for €1.2bn.

Though the Portuguese government still has a majority stake, the acquisition is a show of strength for Lufthansa as it continues to snap up airlines across Europe. It recently upped its interest in Italy’s ITA Airways to 90 per cent and the inclusion of Tap brings the number of airlines and subsidiaries in its portfolio to 11.

The airline beat out its main rival, Air France-KLM Group, by paying more. But existing Star Alliance connections and a commitment to maintaining Tap’s brand identity and route network, alongside investing in and expanding aviation infrastructure across Portugal, also played a role. For Lufthansa, the appeal is clear. “You have Lufthansa now controlling two major hubs,” says Monocle’s editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, speaking on Monocle Radio from São Paulo. “Part of the deal with ITA has been how to use Rome to connect Europe and Africa – and now you have Lufthansa with Lisbon as a hub, which becomes extremely powerful due to [connections with] South America.”

The question remains whether a loss-making southern European airline well beyond Lufthansa’s regional sphere of influence (Tap lost nearly €100m in the first half of 2026) can be integrated as successfully as the likes of Swiss and Austrian Airlines. Many are sceptical that Frankfurt management will be able to deal with Tap’s Latin-Atlantic identity. Watch this space.

To listen to Tyler Brûlé and Gabriel Leigh speaking about the deal, tune in to ‘The Monocle Daily’ and ‘The Globalist’ on Monocle Radio.

At only 71, Pope Leo XIV has announced that he has lung cancer (writes Juliet Linley). Officially he will be back at work by 20 October and a sick pope isn’t automatically sidelined. But what if things worsen?

Though popes in bygone days have relied on relatives to share the load, nobody expects either of the Prevost brothers to fly in from the US and set up a desk within the papal apartments. Leo XIV has likely handed part of his workload to his secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is the Holy See’s equivalent of a prime minister.

The Vatican’s communications have a reputation for being murky but Leo XIV has brought papal transparency to new levels: the announcement of his cancer diagnosis immediately after surgery was astonishingly swift. For Catholics, all bets are off if chemotherapy, radiotherapy or more cumbersome treatments are deemed necessary. Higher-level decisions need the Pope’s sign-off and, if he’s too sick to weigh in, those issues will stay unresolved. As long as a pope remains alive, no matter how incapacitated, nothing in the Vatican’s governance can be changed. A pontiff cannot be replaced or removed.

Worst case scenarios are just that: the worst. And we’re not there yet. But if things go downhill, we must remember that this is no ordinary head of state. From a Catholic perspective, the Pope’s infallibility is indisputable and cannot be passed along to Parolin or anyone else. That’s the pontiff’s prerogative: in sickness and in health.

Juliet Linley is a former Vatican correspondent now based in Zürich.

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