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Catalonia's regional President Carles Puigdemont has missed a deadline set by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to clarify whether the autonomous region had declared its independence or not.

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had given Puigdemont until Monday 10:00am local (08:00 GMT) to make his position clear and until Thursday to change his mind if he called for to secede. Rajoy has threatened that Madrid would suspend Catalonia's autonomy if Puigdemont chooses secession.

Puigdemont has instead written a letter to the Madrid based government calling for dialogue between both parties; an offer which Rajoy has immediately rejected.

"Rajoy has the problem of having to appear as the strongman, because this has been the theme of [his right-wing Popular Party] ever since Francoism," Jordi Graupera, a Catalan political analyst and researcher at Princeton university, told news reporters.

Spain's 1978 constitution decrees that the country is indivisible, and grants the national government exclusive power to hold referendums.

The Madrid based government has however continued to threaten to invoke article 155 of the Spanish constitution which gives it powers to suspend the Catalonia's autonomy.