Let us recognize an indisputable virtue of European justice: one finds out about the sentences on the day and at the time that it is due. This is not a matter that can be taken as a joke. The non-existence of leaks, beyond respect for the litigants, makes explicit the null will of those who judge to prop up political narratives in collusion with the media. The Spanish courts would do well to take note of this way of proceeding, since the forms are, in any matter that concerns the human, the main transmission belt of virtues and defects.
The General Court of the European Union (TGUE) has declared on this occasion the winner without nuances to the Spanish justice in its fight with Carles Puigdemont. The Supreme Court and Judge Pablo Llarena are clearly reinforced. The appeal that has already been announced does not question the clarity and firmness of the facts. Even missing the last word, the reading today is unequivocal: the former president's playing field is greatly reduced in the two fields in which the match has been disputed since day one: the legal and the political.
On the more conjunctural political level, the sentence prevents Carles Puigdemont from becoming the main focus of the campaign. As long as the PP does not intend to patrimonialize the European ruling to hit the PSOE on the head and force a change in the public conversation, moving it away from the agreements with Vox and focusing it on Catalonia. This is a question that the Spanish right always tends to consider opportune and favorable to its interests when the polls are close. Pablo Llarena can also give him oxygen, activating new Euro-orders through the emergency route. Or both at the same time if your interests coincide. In both cases it would be the adversary –political or judicial– who would give the ex-president ownership of the campaign party. For now, the TGUE has sent him to the bench.
There was fear in the circles of political parties and also in the journalists –Puigdemont continues to do so, while his ability to destabilize the political scene is not disputed by anyone– that the decision of the TGUE would place at the epicenter of the start of the campaign a victorious former president of the Generalitat, monopolizing the political agenda or even crossing the Pyrenees back. It would have been holy water for the PP-Vox-Junts trinomial and an ordeal for the PSOE-ERC couple. With that hypothesis vanished, Puigdemont, as in the game of goose when the token falls into the maze, goes back to square 30. Further back from the position he had reached when the dice were more favorable to him.
But close to Catalonia, and no matter how much fuel Junts tried to burn to achieve it, the Puigdemont case is not going to hijack the electoral sprint. The former president falls off the poster. First, because so many years singing the praises of European justice since sovereignism would now prevent the credible claims that would undermine its credibility. Carles Puigdemont himself has reiterated his confidence in community justice despite the setback suffered, although he immediately began the work of discrediting it by clinging to some aspects of the sentence. It can be charged against the ruling, but not with the harshness that has been used without exception against the decisions of the Spanish courts. There is therefore no capacity for electoral mobilization in the decision of the TGUE. And second, because only JxCat is interested in keeping the balloon of exile inflated, which causes ERC indifference –despite hiding it by keeping its general secretary, Marta Rovira, in Switzerland–, and the CUP, to put it another way, neither neither cold nor heat It would be necessary to add the ANC and the Consell per la República to the equation, but these entities are no longer more than nanosatellites, like the ex-minister Clara Ponsatí on the individual level, incapable of causing the slightest ripple in public conversation. Puigdemont is left out of 23-J. Unless the PP, Llarena, or both, decide otherwise.
