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Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialists scored a clear win in the Catalan regional elections on Sunday, as support for pro-independence parties dropped and his party sought to draw a line under more than a decade of separatist turbulence.

The Catalan arm of the Socialist party did not secure enough votes to govern alone, however, pushing it into negotiations with other parties over possible coalitions and voting pacts that could yet include a kingmaking role for the ERC, the least radical brand of separatists.

Salvador Illa, the Socialist regional leader, said “The Catalans have decided to begin a new era” that was open to all — “whatever they think, wherever they come from, wherever they live, whatever language they speak”.

Illa, whose party is a strong defender of Spanish unity, presented the result as a victory over pro-independence forces that have led the regional government for 14 tumultuous years, including an illegal and failed referendum on secession in 2017.

Second place went to Junts per Catalunya, a hardline separatist party led by Carles Puigdemont, who campaigned from France having had to live as a fugitive from Spanish justice over his role in the referendum. However, he was denied his dream of returning to Catalonia to lead a pro-independence coalition government by a collapse in support for the separatist party that has led the incumbent government.

The result was a partial vindication for Sánchez, who has sought to heal some of the divisions created by the referendum, which triggered the worst constitutional crisis in Spain in four decades. His most controversial move has been an amnesty for Puigdemont and hundreds of other separatists, which is due to become law either this month or in June.

Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, said the 42 seats the Socialists won in the 135-member Catalan parliament, up nine from three years ago, were “oxygen for Sánchez”.

But he also highlighted “good results” for rightwing parties that take a far harder line against separatists. The conservative People’s party, the national opposition, increased its seats from three to 15 while the far-right Vox party maintained its 11 seats.

The Socialist party cannot afford to shun the pro-independence parties entirely because its most likely path to government depends on the support — or at least the co-operation — of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), a separatist leftwing group.

ERC led the incumbent minority Catalan government and was the night’s biggest loser, shedding 13 seats to end up with 20. However, it gains a potentially pivotal role from the progressivism it shares with the Socialists and their possible coalition partner, Sumar, a hard-left group that won six seats.

Toni Roldán, a former centrist lawmaker in Spain’s national parliament who is now at the Esade business school, said joining a coalition with the Socialists would undercut ERC’s hopes of leading the pro-independence movement in the future.

A more likely option, he said, would be for ERC to give the Socialists the votes they need to form a minority administration then make deals from outside government to “agree on some laws”.

Pere Aragonès of ERC, the region’s outgoing president, said the party would move into opposition.

Puigdemont, whose Junts per Catalunya increased its seat count by three to reach 35, criticised ERC for letting down the separatist side.

Graduate students and demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin protest the war in Gaza after walking out of commencement at the DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium on May 11, 2024 in Austin.

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Graduate students and demonstrators at the University of Texas at Austin protest the war in Gaza after walking out of commencement at the DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium on May 11, 2024 in Austin.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Graduation ceremonies at a handful of universities across the country faced light disruptions over the weekend, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged walkouts, chants, and waved Palestinian flags during commencement speeches.

At Duke University, crowds of students booed and walked out on commencement speaker Jerry Seinfeld over his ongoing support for Israel. At UC Berkeley, dozens of graduates stood up from their seats inside Memorial Stadium Saturday morning with signs reading “Divest” — a call for universities to get rid of their assets in companies that have investments in Israel because of the war in Gaza. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, pro-Palestinian demonstrators splashed red paint on the steps of a building hours before the commencement ceremony.

The protests come as administrators at universities from California to New York have struggled to find the right balance in responding to the pro-Palestinian encampments that have sprung up in recent weeks. Schools including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been under scrutiny for calling in police to dismantle the encampments and arresting students who refused to disperse.

Other schools, including Northwestern and Brown, have reached agreements with students to take at least some of their demands into consideration. The latest agreement came Sunday, when student protesters at Johns Hopkins University agreed to take down their encampment — which began on April 29 — after the university promised to review students’ demand for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

At Saturday’s university-wide commencement ceremony, UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Carol Christ began the event by acknowledging the student protesters.

“They feel passionately about the brutality of the violence in Gaza,” Christ told the crowd, adding “I, too, am deeply troubled by the terrible tragedy.”

Israel is now in the eighth month of its military offensive inside Gaza, an operation it launched in response to the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas-led militants. More than 1,200 people were killed in the attack, while more than 200 others were taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s response and some 78,000 wounded.

Duke University became the latest scene of protest on Sunday, as dozens of students walked out of their graduation ceremony just as comedian Jerry Seinfeld was preparing to take the stage to deliver the commencement address, according to video posted on social media.

Some in the audience shouted “Free, free Palestine!” while Seinfeld — who has been outspoken in his support of Israel since Oct. 7 — was handed his honorary degree.

Earlier, at Berkeley on Saturday, a group of some 500 people ignored warnings from an administration official and gathered in an empty section of the stadium where they sang chants calling for the university to divest from Israel.

“This wouldn’t be Berkeley without a protest,” said the student body president, Sydney Roberts, as her speech was disrupted by demonstrators’ chants.

While students at UC Berkeley have been amongst the most vocal in their calls for the university to cut ties with Israel, recent protests have also been met with accusations of antisemitism from members of the campus’s Jewish community.

Known for being the birthplace of the free speech movement of the 1960s, the university has been dealing with two federal investigations relating to charges of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 attack — one from the Department of Education, the other by Republicans in Congress.

Some protests went beyond the war in Gaza

Dozens of students at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond staged a silent walkout during Saturday’s graduation ceremony to protest the commencement address from Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin.

The university’s chapter of the NAACP had previously criticized the school’s decision to invite Youngkin over his efforts to unravel a series of policies which have promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

“Since becoming Governor of Virginia, Youngkin has worked to intimidate and silence educators with anti-racist pedagogies,” the group wrote in a letter sent to the university president Michael Rao and the board of visitors last week, urging them to rescind Youngkin’s invitation to speak.

The letter cited a now defunct tip line the governor briefly put in place where parents could report faculty who were teaching “divisive concepts” in schools as well as unraveling legislation which rights groups argued protected transgender youth.

Youngkin has defended his criticism of DEI policies, previously stating he believes they result in lowered standards in the name of “equity.”

All eyes on Biden’s upcoming commencement address

The recent disruptions come just a week before President Biden is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

The university has faced criticism by those who are against Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza and his more recent comments about student protesters — in which he said some of them used “violent” methods.

A group of faculty members will vote this week about whether or not to award Biden an honorary degree during the ceremony.

In an interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition on Sunday, Morehouse College President David A. Thomas said he was “fully in support” of Biden coming to speak at the university.

“The nation needs somewhere that can visualize for us the ability to hold the tensions that in so many ways are threatening to divide our society, that have divided some of the most venerable campuses in the country,” Thomas said, adding “that’s what Morehouse was born for.”

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Vladimir Putin has replaced two of his longest-serving security officials in a surprise reshuffle, suggesting the Russian president is dissatisfied with the handling of his two-year invasion of Ukraine.

Putin, who was sworn in for a fifth term in office earlier this week extending his quarter-century rule until at least 2030, has moved Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister since 2012, to become head of Russia’s security council on Sunday, according to the upper house of parliament.

Andrei Belousov, a deputy prime minister and longtime economic adviser to Putin, is to replace Shoigu.

Nikolai Patrushev, a hawkish former spy and one of Putin’s closest aides who has led the security council since 2008, will take up an unspecified new position.

Putin’s appointments mark the biggest shake-up of his security officials in a decade and a half, even as his forces continue to advance against Ukraine’s outmanned, outgunned army.

The Kremlin painted Shoigu’s move as part of efforts to rein in Russia’s runaway defence spending. On Putin’s orders to supply armed forces fighting in Ukraine this has been earmarked for the current year at a record Rbs10.8tn ($118.5bn).

Shoigu had previously been seen as a near-untouchable figure thanks to his closeness to Putin — with whom he has holidayed several times in Tuva, his home region in Siberia — and for his success in seeing off the challenge from a mutiny by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin last year.

However, even as Russia gained the upper hand in Ukraine in recent months, Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, continued to arouse widespread ire among supporters of the war over the military’s many battlefield failures.

Russia’s security services arrested Timur Ivanov, a deputy defence minister, on corruption charges late last month, a step seen as indicating Putin had wanted to weaken Shoigu.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told reporters the Kremlin wanted to appoint an economic official to run the defence ministry after Russia’s security budget ballooned to 6.6 per cent of gross domestic product.

“This isn’t a critical number for now but, because of well-known geopolitical circumstances around us, we are gradually getting closer to the situation in the mid-1980s when the share of spending on security was just 4 per cent,” Peskov said.

“This demands special attention,” Peskov added. “It’s very important to put the security economy in line with the economy of the country, so that it meets the dynamics of the current moment.”

“It’s also important to point out that, on the battlefield, he who is more open to innovation [ . . . ] wins. At this stage, the president has decided that a civilian should run the defence ministry.”

Peskov said Belousov’s tenure as an economic adviser to Putin, as minister of economic development, and as first deputy prime minister, was suitable experience for a defence ministry that needed to be “open to innovation, implementing advanced ideas, and creating conditions for economic competition.”

He said Belousov’s appointment would not affect the work of Gerasimov, Russia’s top commander in Ukraine.

He did not explain why Patrushev had been replaced. Patrushev “continues to work, and in the next few days we will tell you where,” Peskov told reporters.

Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who studies the Russian military, said the shake-up showed it was “clear that Russian economic elites performed far better than military elites in this war.”

Belousov’s appointment means Gerasimov will eventually also be replaced, Kofman said.

“Shoigu was incompetent but loyal. The same can be said of Gerasimov. In the past chiefs of general staff were replaced with the minister of defence. Although Peskov has said that Gerasimov will stay on, Belousov will likely want his own person in there.”