They will not deny me that, despite Mr. Sánchez's unprecedented capacity for resistance, in recent times the Government seems like one of those guys who go to the dentist and come out with a bandaged head. As if he did not have enough with his electoral troubles, his lack of enthusiasm in the polls and an economic situation between gloomy and sinister, now that funny business of espionage explodes in his hands without even (I refer to the dates) having the consolation of being able to do so attribute to Mr. Rajoy, a wild card more than burned at this point.
An issue, by the way, in which there is the laughable paradox that Sánchez is ashamed of having spied on and proud of being spied on, when in a moderately serious country his feelings should be just the opposite: he would only have been spied on for reasons perfectly justifiable and you would have been spied on for regrettable security breaches.
Fortunately for Sánchez, there is nothing that expires as quickly as the interest in serious and urgent matters. I refer to the facts: nobody is talking about covid anymore, Mr. Casado seems as remote as the Gothic kings and people plan their vacation trips as if the war in Ukraine were being fought in Alpha Centauri.
Obviously, there are many things that I do not know about the use given to that famous Pegasus system, although, given the general context of the story, I do not think I am being reckless if I venture that someone has screwed up. And not because a foreign government has spied on the president and his ministers: those intelligence failures occur everywhere. It is enough to think that the CIA did not even smell that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (if it did, the thing is much worse), nor 9/11, nor the Russian invasion of Crimea to see where the shots are going in this stuff.
The blunder will be more a matter of those who came to believe that it was an excellent idea to snoop on certain political opponents. This is what happens when national security is confused with phenomena of more or less massive political dissidence; or when it is believed that the reason of State overrides liberal principles and, furthermore, the error is seasoned with high doses of clumsiness.
It is true that I could be blamed for drawing this type of conclusion without waiting for the declassification of secret documents or the final result of judicial investigations, but, as someone said, if you go through a fence and see two long and pointed ears sticking out and you hear a bray, you don't have to jump the wall to know that behind there is a donkey.
If not, look at what he does to the Catalan independence supporters – those shady people who struggle in manipulating young children (not very successful, given the results of Vox in Catalonia) and recruiting old women to confront them with the police – of which seems that some were spied on with a court order and others without it, which says a lot about the nonsense we are witnessing.
Remember that in the entire process of the procés no court needed to intercept the communications of the investigated politicians. Probably because everything they did was more than documented in the official newspapers and in statements to the media, that if they were guilty of something it was not secrecy, but rather an overwhelming exhibitionism. And that we are talking about what some have defined as the greatest challenge since the beginning of democracy. They must be the same ones who think that a military coup and the murderous terrorism of ETA were petty pranks. However, even in the face of this evidence, there are few voices from outside the independence movement that question a change in criteria (judicial, apparently) that seems to legitimize the intolerable interference that these wiretaps entail.
It is not surprising. Liberals –those who believe that "the defense of freedom must be dogmatic, without any concession to opportunism, even when it is not possible to demonstrate that, aside from the positive effects, its infringement may entail some harmful consequences"– shine for their absence in our country. And the phrase is not from Mr. Rufián, but from Von Hayek.
Because those who define themselves as liberals in Spain are those who trust everything to tax cuts or advocate minimal state intervention except when it comes to fighting ideological opponents or the rights of pregnant women. And so it goes.
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