Can the invasion that the Constitutional Court makes today of the Spanish legislature be compared with the measures issued by the same arbitration body against the Parliament of Catalonia during the process? I am inclined to say yes, although they are not identical situations, but they do reflect similar behaviors and attitudes among relevant sectors of the judicial leadership. Remember that this interference prohibited the deputies elected by the Catalan citizens from discussing some matters of general interest, for example, the role of the monarchy, an institution that those of us who live in this corner of the peninsula also pay for.
Apparently, for some, the comparison is not appropriate, because putting down the Catalan conflict would justify everything. What was good in October 2017 is now scandalizing, the indignation of variable geometry is something very seen, especially among official socialists. The same world that did not see coming that the landing strip that was given to the reactionaries (the respectable conservative term no longer serves to describe the landscape) taking advantage of the Catalan turbulences would be used, sooner or later, not only against the independentistas.
Instead of talking about comparisons, on which it will be difficult to agree, I propose another way of looking at it. Without the Catalan testing laboratory, the magistrates of the TC who now dare to step on the red lines probably would not have done so. This exceptionality – applauded in its day by the two major parties – has given wings to the members of the highest arbitration body. This being the case, the PSOE (which could have been finer in its actions to break the popular blockade) is swallowing a syrup that it helped to elaborate, once Rajoy outsourced the management of the Catalan crisis to the police forces and the courts.
Here is fulfilled a golden rule verified in various democracies facing internal conflicts of a territorial and national order, formulated by Seán MacBride (Irish politician and founder of Amnesty International) when analyzing how the governments of the United Kingdom tried to resolve the question of Northern Ireland. North: forcing and subverting the rules with exceptions to combat and destroy a dissident political actor who is considered an "enemy" seriously erodes the democratic quality of the State that is heading down this path. The power that entrusts the entire defense of the status quo to the regular and irregular application of force and punishment ends up damaging the credibility of the building that it intends to protect.
In the hard version of this theory, the Spanish showcase exhibits the dirty war against the terrorism of ETA, whose imprint created frameworks for interpretation and action that were automatically transferred to the Catalan situation. In the soft version of the same theory, the Spanish showcase shows the police charges against the voters on October 1 and the reports where violence that never occurred is attributed to Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart. If we look a little further into recent history, we discover that the sentence that charged the Statute of 2006, issued by a TC with expired members, already responded to the dark inertia described by MacBride. Institutional degradation lasts more than a decade.
However, the change of slope occurs with the creation of the coalition government made up of PSOE and Unidas Podemos, an unprecedented historical milestone since Franco's death. All the alarm bells go off among the elites that feel they own the State and the slogan of the “illegitimate government” is repeated. The socialists enter the twilight zone. The frustration of the PP is superimposed on the will of the judicial right to act as a brake on a reformist agenda that overwhelms them. Carlos Lesmes, before resigning as president of the CGPJ and the Supreme Court, gave clues as to what could happen if the legislator launched certain initiatives: "There is a risk that if this announced de-judicialization materializes, what will end up producing is a flight from the law or, what is even more serious, the principle of equality in the application of the law to all citizens, since there would be no other consequence than the triumph of the undisguised claim of impunity of certain categories of subjects against the rest of the citizens for the simple fact of its capacity for political influence”. We were warned.
