Twelve of October with gas. More soldiers on parade. More boos in the Castellana. More guests at the Royal Palace. More whispering in the huddles. More absorption. More institutional flooding after the resignation of the president of the General Council of the Judiciary and the Supreme Court. An October Twelfth with more people on the beach and in the countryside than other years, the day was splendid. An October Twelfth with few masks, as if everything that has happened had not happened.
A Twelfth of October with more soldiers in the parade. Four thousand members of the Armed Forces, as in the best times before the epidemic. Parade in the Castellana of all life, despite the information that this past summer pointed to the possibility that the celebration of October 12 moved to another city, in accordance with the decentralization will of the Government. The format of the Spanish national holiday has been the subject of silent discussion for years, without any government daring to modify the rituals that were imposed during the transition. The newspaper Abc published last August that the Ministry of Defense was considering moving this year's parade to another city, which caused an immediate adverse reaction from the Madrid authorities. After a few weeks, Defense sources pointed out that the transfer of the parade to another Spanish city would cause an increase in its cost that would not be understood by the public. Thus the matter was settled. .
October 12 with more public and with more boos to the president of the socialist government, an exercise that the Madrid right has been practicing since the times of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Family members of the Armed Forces are located in the areas closest to the presidential court, with their corresponding invitations. These boos show, therefore, the ideological profile of a significant sector of the armed forces in Spain. Pedro Sánchez tried to avoid that scene yesterday, speeding up the times. Someone in his team decided that the President of the Government would not have to wait too long for the King and Queen, enduring a barrage of insults. Times were shortened. Maybe too much. Sánchez arrived 52 seconds late and the King and Queen had to wait around a minute inside the official car for big occasions, one of the three Rolls-Royce Phantoms that General Francisco Franco acquired for the Head of State in 1952. The delay of Sánche thus became one of the notes of the day.
More guests than ever at the Royal Palace: 2,500 people. Large format to leave behind the cancellation of 2020 and the reduced reception of last year. Rooms full to overflowing. If within ten days we do not see a significant rise in covid cases in the Spanish capital, it will be a sign that the epidemic is truly under control. There was a slight euphoria in the palace. an oblivion Life consists of looking forward.
More people in the palace and more buzz in the huddles, those eddies that form around the most relevant personalities. This year, the great protagonist was the absent pillar of the Judiciary, after the resignation of Carlos Lesmes as president of the General Council of the Judiciary and the Supreme Court.
There were magistrates in the palace. The president of the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court, Manuel Marchena, for example, was chatting with the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, a magistrate on leave of absence.
Dominant theme in the huddles: the negotiations for the renewal of the governing body of the Judiciary, resumed between the two main political parties as a result of the resignation of Lesmes and the growing concern in the European Commission about a blockade that does not help Brussels to confront the political invasion of the judiciary orchestrated by the national-populist governments of Hungary and Poland. The Spanish blockade has become an excellent alibi for the Hungarian Víktor Orbán and the Polish Mateusz Morawiecki.
It was the first group of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in his capacity as candidate for the presidency of the Government. A busy huddle. With little more than a year to go before the general elections are held, there are not many incentives for the Popular Party to agree on a new composition of the CGPJ in accordance with the correlation of forces that emerged from the last electoral cycle. The blockade imposed by the PP begins to trade in the futures market. Polls say the right can win the next general election, or close the gap. With that expectation a year ahead, agreeing today does not pay off. But the resignation of Lesmes – a decision that the PP has accepted with disgust – forces negotiations. Appearing now as a blocker of a necessary pact would trade between bad and very bad among the moderate electorate that Núñez Feijóo tries to capture.
The last barometer of the CIS detects a flight of 500,000 votes from the PSOE to the PP. That is what is at stake. Núñez Feijóo says he is willing to agree, but asks Sánchez for guarantees in writing that the PSOE will agree to modify the CGJP's election system to give greater prominence to the judicial career, following a report from the European organizations that ensure the independence of power judicial. The messages from the group of Núñez Feijóo reached the group of Sánchez and vice versa. Sánchez seems to be buying time so that the agreement cannot be reversed. The leader of the PSOE is also very much at stake in this episode. At stake is the title of Pactist, prized figure among the undecided electorate.
A sunny and spa-like Twelfth of October, as if Spain were truly far from the leaky gas pipelines of the Baltic Sea and the winter fears that run through the great European plain, from the rice fields of the Po to the gates of Tallinn, from Paris to Sebastopol. We are not going to invoke General Winter, because every time this image is recalled a kitten dies in Siberia. Let's say that Spain is in her things, as if the gas was never going to be lacking.
