BARCELONA: Quim Torra, the man chosen by ousted Catalan president Carles Puigdemont to be his successor, may be a newcomer to politics but he has long been a staunch separatist.

Puigdemont on Thursday stepped aside from being re-appointed leader of the region a day after the central government stepped in to block him from once again becoming president of Catalonia.

The man the self-exiled Catalan leader has named as his preferred candidate to form a regional government is a dyed-in-the-wool independence advocate cut from the same cloth.

“We need a really strong government and a really strong country, Catalonia right now faces a monumental challenge,” the 55-year-old father-of-three told Catalan television TV3 on Friday.

“We’re not only talking about a political crisis but a humanitarian crisis with people in prison and in exile,” he added, referring to nine separatist leaders jailed on charges of rebellion and others, including Puigdemont, abroad.

A native of the Catalan town of Blanes, on the Costa Brava, Torra only entered politics a few months ago.

But he has been a major cultural figure over the last decade pushing for the region to fully break from Spain.

After a long career with the Swiss insurance firm Winterthur, Torra used a severance package to set up a publishing house in 2008.

There he specialised in reviving texts by Catalan journalists from the civil war and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, which severely repressed Catalonia, among other regions.

He soon made a name for himself in Catalan nationalist circles, joining various separatist organisations, including those that helped organise the huge rallies that eventually led to last year’s independence push and subsequent political crisis.

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2018