The imprisonment of Abel Mora, a young Catalan independence activist, sentenced to 3 years and 9 months' jail as a co-perpetrator of injuries to a man carrying a Spanish flag, in an incident in the Barcelona metro as the man was returning from taking part in a demonstration of the Spanish police union Jusapol, in November 2018, makes him the first victim of state retaliation to enter prison despite the parliamentary passage of the amnesty law. I don't know what would have happened if, in addition to being approved by the Congress of Deputies last Thursday morning, the law had also been published in the official state gazette, which, without being mandatory, usually happens a few days later, if, as in this case, there is nothing to impede it.
What should never have happened is for the Socialist (PSOE) government to put the state gazette to electoral use, since just as the Socialists have something to gain, delaying all the judicial appeals that might emerge until after the European elections next Sunday, so do the Catalan independentists lose, since their rights are diminished by the delay. Abel Mora is one case of this and with a more agile timetable on making the law effective, perhaps his situation would be different. In any case, it would not be politics marking the calendar, but Spanish justice. Not that it is much better, but, at the very least, we would have entered a different phase in which it would be possible to see more clearly what the reaction of the Supreme Court will be. So far, judge Manuel Marchena and the rest of the members of the court's criminal chamber seem to be taking the hardest and most tortuous path for the independence movement.
With the electoral use of the state gazette, the PSOE government delays the possible judicial appeals against the amnesty, and the Catalan independentists see their rights diminished
If this turns out to be their chosen course, we will surely be talking about a situation where they refuse to apply the law and await the preliminary rulings that are raised in Europe in order to have a final decision. The prosecutors of the Supreme Court already laid out their road map in this direction last week, establishing the doctrine that misuse of public funds offences would be outside the amnesty law. It is obvious that if this were the final pronouncement, the time until a return to politics for the prisoners from the 2019 Supreme Court trial who were partially pardoned - from Oriol Junqueras to Jordi Turull, among others - would be a much more extended period, perhaps as long as several years. The same would apply to the exiles, starting with president Carles Puigdemont, with no definitive criterion being established regarding his liberty when he returns to Catalonia when he has announced that he will be present for the investiture of the new Catalan president, whether the candidate is Salvador Illa or himself. That is to say, the only two who have announced a decision to try to obtain the necessary majority in Parliament.
For all of these reasons, I find it so difficult to understand why there is not much greater pressure being applied to the Pedro Sánchez government to publish the law in the BOE and not gamble for votes with such important issues. Just in case, every morning I look to see if it has been promulgated, because never has something so important depended on so few people. When we ask why people stay away from politics, this is a textbook case. We are not asking the voters to understand these manoeuvres, nor are we insisting on the importance of being able to influence the Spanish government through 14 pro-independence deputies. Because, all of a sudden, there is the emergence of Alvise Pérez, an extreme-right communicator who is running in this Sunday's elections under the candidature Se acabó la fiesta ("The party is over"), and a CIS poll that appeared on Monday asserted that it may be the fifth most voted party in Spain, behind the big four and ahead of all peripheral alliances, pro-independence parties and Podemos. And so, no one understands anything and everyone is surprised.