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Barcelona. — A meeting of Catalan parliament scheduled for today to vote on a bid by the region’s fugitive separatist president Carles Puigdemont to form a new government was in doubt after a court ruled he must be present.

“All hypotheses are open,” a parliamentary source said yesterday, two days after Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that Puigdemont must be present at the assembly to be chosen as the region’s chief.

The court also said that Puigdemont, who fled to Belgium shortly after the Catalan parliament declared independence on October 27, must turn himself in and ask for a judge’s permission to attend the parliamentary session. Puigdemont faces arrest for rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds as soon as he returns.

“We still have not fully decided what we are going to do,” Puigdemont’s lawyer, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, told Catalan radio. Catalonia’s independence declaration was short-lived as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy moved to stop the crisis in a region deeply divided over secession.Rajoy imposed direct rule on the semi-autonomous region, sacked its government including Puigdemont, dissolved parliament and called snap elections.

But in a major setback for the central government, separatist parties won 70 of the 135 seats in Catalonia’s regional parliament — two less than in the 2015 election — during last month’s snap election although did not win a majority of the votes.

The separatist parties want to reinstate Puigdemont as head of the Catalan government, arguing he was given a democratic mandate for the independence declaration during a contested referendum, which Spain and the courts declared illegal. — AFP.