Mariano Rajoy says he would enter dialogue with a new Catalan government but not its former leader, Carles Puigdemont Oscar Del Pozo/AFP/GettyThe prize for the most ill-judged electoral call of 2017 was Theresa May’s by a distance, until Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, pipped her at the post. Rajoy confidently believed that Thursday’s Catalan elections would crush the region’s independence movement, but instead it was his centre-right Popular Party that was crushed, coming last behind the equivalent of Britain’s ­Monster Raving Loony Party. Worse still for the Spanish unionist cause, the independence bloc now has the parliamentary seats to resume control of the Catalan government less than two months after Rajoy overthrew it by constitutional decree, imposing direct rule from Madrid. Eminent Spaniards have been frothing at what they perceive to be the insulting failure of the foreign media to acknowledge the admirable maturity of…

Source: The Times December 24, 2017 00:03 UTC