"With the ruling of the Estatut, the Constitutional Court (TC) lost the authority it had, and it is worrying because in the model we opted for in the Constitution it fulfilled the role of peacemaker and stabilizer. This would have to be recovered," according to the former president. of the Government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
This is what is included in the book "Espanya no es toca. Les cartes de l'Estat al découvre" (La Campana), an analysis by journalists Ferran Casas and Joan Rusiñol on the "immovable" pillars of the constitutional system born in 1978.
Through their own journalistic experience -in Barcelona and Madrid- and interviews with personalities such as Zapatero himself, Pere Aragonès, Artur Mas, Esperanza Aguirre, Juan Luis Cebrián, Iñaki Anasagasti, Jaume Giró and Joaquim Nadal, the authors explore how from the de facto powers of the political, media and judicial world in Spain there are those who try to shield a status quo that has been threatened in recent years by the independence movement and Podemos.
The book reflects on how the judicial power in Spain has become a "battlefield between two sides every time there is tension", as happened with the Statute debate, cut by the TC after the PP's appeal against the approved text by the Cortes during Zapatero's term and endorsed in a referendum in Catalonia.
"To the extent that democracy fragments and polarizes, this impacts the judiciary, because it does not live in another galaxy but rather in the sociopolitical context of the moment. That is why the containment and balance of the TC and other institutions is so important. judicial instances," Zapatero reasons in his interview with the authors of the book.
After the train crash of 2017, according to Zapatero, "the powers that have acted with the most virulence" are those that "make Spanish nationalism and the unity of Spain their 'leitmotif' when defending the Constitution."
"Until then, polarization had more to do with the traditional left-right axis and there was no phenomenology different from that of other countries. But from that moment on, a very powerful reactive factor was produced in everything that has to do with with national unity," argues the former president of the Government.
Another of the voices consulted by Casas and Rusiñol is that of the former minister and former Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre, who summarizes her recipe for the Catalan conflict in this way: "The law, the entire law and nothing but the law."
"Pedro Sánchez does what the enemies of Spain tell him, that is, the communists, the Catalan independentists and Bildu, in order to stay in Moncloa," denounces Aguirre.
Former Catalan president Artur Mas also contributes his point of view, recognizing the candor with which Catalan political groups often approach their relationship with the State.
"We have not fully understood how the State works because we have never had it. Now, with clubs, we have learned a lot," says Mas, who denounces the "openly personal campaigns of destruction" that he suffered when he activated the 'procés'.
Ferran Casas (Barcelona, 1977) is deputy director of the digital newspaper He was born and was a correspondent for Avui in Madrid between 2000 and 2007, while Joan Rusiñol (Tona, Barcelona, 1979) is deputy news director of Catalunya Ràdio, a station for which He was also a correspondent in Madrid from 2006 to 2010.
