The Welsh nationalist leader has objected to Prince William's new title of Prince of Wales.
Adam Price, Plaid Cymru leaders and member of the Senedd, or Welsh assembly, for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, welcomed Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford's comments on Monday.
Drakeford, a member of the main opposition Labour Party which runs the devolved administration with the support of Plaid Cymru, said there should be a debate about a future elected head of state in the principality — after the national mourning for Queen Elizabeth II had ended.
"I think there’s a discussion there and it’s alive and happening already," Drakeford said, "but this week is a week about reflecting on the life of service, the memories people have of someone who has been part of everyone’s life for so long."
He added that William "will want to take his time to make sure he becomes familiar and the ground is firm under his feet."
Responding on Tuesday to reports that William's investiture ceremony will be held in Wales — after his father King Charles III passed the title to him on Friday — the nationalist leader said: "A line is crossed because that gives the Prince of Wales a quasi-official status in Welsh life."
"I think that’s a decision that we in Wales should make in a time when we’re living in a modern democratic Wales," Price added. "It’s a decision we need to make here before any announcement is made."
"I’m a republican, and there is sensitivity and pain around the title for many of us," he stressed.
The title of Prince of Wales — Tywysog Cymru in Welsh — has been bestowed on the eldest son and heir apparent of English and later British monarchs since 1301. The king or queen holds the title themselves if they have no male children, or if their heir dies before they do.
Welsh landowner Owain Glyndwr, who led a rebellion against English rule from 1400 to 1412, was given the title by the first Senedd that he founded, in rivalry to prince Henry — later crowned as Henry V.
More than 22,000 people have signed an online petition, protesting that giving the title to the son of the British monarch "remains an insult to Wales and is a symbol of historical oppression," while objecting that it "implies that Wales is still a principality, undermining Wales' status as a nation and a country."
But in contrast to Price's republican stance, the petition asserted that the last "native" prince of Wales was Llywelyn the Last, whose head was cut off and paraded through London following his death in 1282 at the Battle of Orewin Bridge, where the Welsh were defeated by an English army.
Following the gradual conquest of Wales from the time of the Norman invasion of Britain to 1283, the country became a principality of England. Since 1998 it has had a devolved parliament and government similar to those of Scotland and Northern Ireland — but remains part of a single legal jurisdiction and administrative area with England.
The notable Tudor dynasty, who ruled the kingdom from 1482 to 1603 through a historically tumultuous era, originally hailed from Wales.