Politics has a very wide sleeve and is built on unforeseen events. The surprise of the unexpected should not be anesthetized, comments Edgar Morin in his Lessons from a Century of Life. Modern media prophets are crushed by historians, who deal with what happened and not with what the creators of the metaphors predicted. That the investiture of the Government of Spain depended on the will of a fugitive from Spanish justice is not written in any novel by Graham Greene or John le Carré. This may occur in the coming days as the great paradox of recent history.
I don't know what all the socialist ministers and deputies who have defended and gone around the world explaining why the events of 2017 were an attack on democracy think. The judiciary held a long process that ended in harsh criminal sentences for those who broke the law and spent a few years in prison, which they abandoned after the pardons granted by the Pedro Sánchez government.
The amnesty that is being processed with stealth and with small gradual gestures such as the meeting between the number three of the PSOE and Carles Puigdemont in Brussels is a very notable qualitative leap because it indicates Pedro Sánchez's will to achieve his investiture very soon at the price of renouncing what he promised several times during the campaign. Amnesty, no, he said and repeated in debates and interviews. Well, amnesty yes, in the name of Spain and making a virtue of necessity. I don't know if the inspirers of this strategy read that reflection by Machiavelli when he writes that "men do evil, unless necessity forces them to do good." Evil and the temptation of good, Todorov said.
The amnesty can be considered a necessity to resolve the old Catalan question or to facilitate coexistence in Catalonia and reset the counter to the events of October 2017. But any informed person knows that this is not the case and that this promised amnesty is the price of Pedro Sánchez's investiture as president of the Government.
The problem is not the amnesty itself, but the motivations with which it has been proposed. Arguing that if there is no amnesty there will be new elections and that the right and the extreme right may come is to admit that the Socialist Party and the independentists who promise support would lose votes and seats if this policy were put to the polls in a few months. .
The visit to Brussels of Santos Cerdán, secretary of organization of the PSOE, before a smiling Puigdemont and with the keys to the next government in his pocket, may benefit Pedro Sánchez, but, at the same time, foster a powerful critical current in the socialist party and in his electorate.
Because? Because in the face of the generosity of the State, the independence movement that Puigdemont represents offers nothing in return. Not even a renunciation of the referendum or a recognition that something was done outside the law in the events of October 2017. Politics tolerates everything and has always coexisted with the corruption of some and others. But the State, no matter how clumsy and unfair it may be, does not lose battles. And the government in power, whoever it may be, is only part of the power structure that has many ways of acting when it is intended to destroy it from within.
