In the dead of a mythical night echoing in eternity, before the unconquerable ramparts of a Near-Eastern outpost long thought lost, a league of Achean city-states outdid their fruitless ten-year siege through a legendary blitz enabled by subterfuge. The master stroke scored in Barcelona on Thursday morning, thirty-four centuries later and at the Mediterranean’s opposite end, recalls the genius of the wrathful Greeks—only with the act’s every feature inverted.

Seven years since going fugitive, now was the time for him to defy his search warrant and make a comeback

Instead of armed conflict, Catalonia’s secessionist minority and the democratic remainder of Spain are embroiled in a decades-long, zero-sum and morally infused vendetta over territoriality and the prospect—and possible forms—of a break-up. Carles Puigdemont, the former’s de facto leader for all of eight years, oversaw an unconstitutional coup in 2017 staged as a plebiscite of self-determination, unilaterally declared independence, and escaped the legal fallout on the back trunk of a car to Brussels, where he has since served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). Even as, owing to left-leaning and favorable developments in Madrid, the bill will never come fully due for his original felony, Puigdemont woke up on Thursday at the peak neither of his Catalan popularity, nor—seemingly—of his potential to harm Spain.

Yet that persistent adversity, much like the beachhead inanition of the war-torn naval invaders into Anatolia, is precisely what made attractive a subterfuge to make Thursday morning’s showing in the heart of the Catalan citadel. Mid-June saw Spain’s controversial amnesty bill—unconstitutional also—horse-traded in Madrid for six votes Puigdemont’s party supplied to the confidence motion that reenthroned socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in November. The Supreme Court, however, found the former’s embezzlement of public funds destined for the 2017 referendum unpardonable last month, a ruling meant in part to protect the “financial integrity” of EU monies. With many of his lieutenants facing the lone charge of seditiously subverting public order, Puigdemont deemed unfair the brunt he was taking, and the occasion ripe to flex his muscles by testing his exemption from the amnesty.

The regional electoral cycle called for a lurch, too. In the heels of snap elections in May, Catalonia readied to inaugurate a new Parliament on Thursday, where Puigdemont’s party, the liberal-centrist Junts, was not only out of power, but not even part of the ruling coalition for the first time in fourteen years. Worse still, the two parties backing the new tight majority led by Pedro Sánchez’s former health minister, the soft-spoken fellow socialist Salvador Illa, compete with Junts for the secessionist vote: Esquerra Republicana and Comunes, both solidly left-wing. Puigdemont’s radical legacy was imperiled by this tripartite coalition with PSOE in it, of which Illa leads the Catalan branch, and whose overtures to a previously unthinkable amnesty law in Madrid, though serving Sánchez’s raw power calculus, converted many a former secessionist to a party national in scope. Illa’s swearing-in seemed to signal a move away from the cycle launched in 2017, if not from its secessionist end goal, then at least in its adherents’ intent to transitorily find common ground with Madrid’s willingness to placate regionalist aspirations.

Puigdemont’s exile, then, was looking clumsier and—maybe—more definitive. Seven years since going fugitive, now was the time for him to defy his search warrant and make a comeback. Yet any move to get in on the action, as was in the air of speculation, could hardly avoid detention, let alone turn around his disadvantage. In the uncertain case he was to disobey and drive in from France, and then into the city, his party had set a stage near the Arc de Triomf, for a speech that could hardly turn triumphant. A security perimeter encircled the regional lower house, to which he had been elected in May on top of his party’s list, after which he gave up his euro-seat in June. Puigdemont flouted the warrant, entered Barcelona, and spoke on the stump for all of five minutes to a crowd of about 2.500, with antiriot units to prevent unionist hecklers and a detail of the regional secret service tracking his every step and laying the groundwork for an all-too-likely arrest. His fist raised, chanting “independence”, “free Catalonia”, and denouncing “amnesty laws that don’t deliver amnesty”, the air reeked of a Trumpian tour de force.

By the time his speech was over, Puigdemont’s acolytes urged the crowd to swarm him en route to Parliament, where the 135 MPs had been summoned. The boldness of the move seemed for a moment likely, and Puigdemont willing to turn himself in. Yet after a five-minute bain de foule, the scruff-haired, bespectacled coup-plotter was amiss again, withered away through the backstage and amidst the crowds. His seat went empty throughout the parliamentary session, with his colleagues looking at one another askance, wondering what to do next without a leader whose vanishing signaled detachment, breakdown in communication, and contempt for democracy. When his name was roll-called they applauded—but looked naturally leaderless and lost.

The Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalonia’s regional police, had failed to detain him at several nodes leading up to his appearance, but his re-disappearance was even less likely, harder to prepare for—yet recklessly discounted. The Mossos quickly placed even tougher checks on the city’s road exits and the region’s—to no avail. The plan had been to detain him discreetly, but instead rowdy chaos set in. Fifteen minutes after being onstage, a kind of humiliating malaise had taken hold of Spain—a blow inflicted on the country’s unionist spirit, more baffling in a sense than 2017 itself, more demoralizing than the worst of military defeats, all under the watchful gaze of about 100 journalists and, moments later, the whole world.

The embarrassment permeated into a sense of the flustered party being in journalistic retard of the nose-thumbers: on Sunday Catalonia’s publicly-funded TV took to celebrating Puigdemont’s return to Belgian safety after a successful trick of political witchcraft, even as visual evidence went lacking on Spanish networks of him at the “Home of the Catalan Republic”, the 500 square meters, 360 kilometers away from Brussels, home to the “President-in-exile”. In videos released since, he is seen strolling in downtown back-alleys pre-speech, with none of the human chain that has been alleged would have prevented a smooth arrest. What security barrier should have cordoned off the epicenter where the antics were to be performed had in fact a felon-shaped hole, that couldn’t have been punched by Puigdemont alone. The sense of powerlessness and paralysis in the country feels stifling.

Spaniards feel that the authorities who should have been guarding the gates have instead flung them open

There’s a lot of explaining to do, but Sánchez’s government, hanging by the thread of Puigdemont’s six votes for virtually any legislation, is making no effort towards it. The Interior Ministry is yet to make a statement, even as the national security forces, nowhere as compromised with secessionist politics as some of the Mossos top brass can be, are also at fault for negligence, as are the intelligence services, who could have deployed a more robust operation around Puigdemont’s Belgian residence, in Waterloo, days prior. Sánchez’s government is, in fact, yet to utter a word, even as many of its key ministers have lavished praise on the newly-sworn-in Illa. One collaborator from the Mossos, who allegedly put his own white Honda for the first leg of the breakout operation, was found and detained soon after, with another one following in the hours after. To add insult to injury, they have since been spotted and identified, bodyguarding Puigdemont, in the live footage of him on his way downtown.

It’s easy to imagine an openness to letting a fugitive felon pull the spectacular stunt—double down on his insult to law and order and get away scot-free—running deeper into the state apparatus than we currently know. It’s also hard to not see part of a premeditated plan that dovetails snugly with the central government’s strategy of “placating” Puigdemont’s movement through concessions that will prove emboldening, a plan framed by the socialist strategy to stealthily dissolve national unity, of which Puigdemont’s unpunished return is the latest step. For many of us, the scenario of collusion between Puigdemont and Madrid is more than plausible—a collusion of which the inevitably humiliating effect on Spaniards is celebrated by Puigdemont’s movement and consented by the ruling socialists. Spaniards feel that the authorities who should have been guarding the gates have instead flung them open, and that no higher authority is fighting the just war on their behalf. They should not easily forget who is responsible.