Carles Puigdemont is a Spanish politician who served as the President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the government of Catalonia, from January 2016 to October 2017. He is the leader of the Catalan pro-independence movement and has been a major figure in the Catalan independence referendum of 2017.

Puigdemont was born in Barcelona in 1962 and studied at the University of Barcelona, where he obtained a degree in Catalan Philology. He began his political career