I read that Spain's former king Juan Carlos I is thinking of going into exile in the Dominican Republic in the face of the penal future that he has ahead, with the announced intervention in his case by the Supreme Court's prosecutors and, above all, the action of the Swiss judiciary, which is relentlessly continuing its work. Until that moment arrives, solitude is his only companion: one imagines the emeritus locked in his palace quarters, socially repudiated, as he has ceased to be invited to public or private events, and having virtually no contact except by telephone. The greedy monarch who for so many years was above good and evil and who miraculously managed to emerge unscathed from the historic trial of Spain's 1981 attempted coup sits and watches westerns as the only consolation to try and avoid thinking about the disgraceful ending he has achieved through his own efforts.
The establishment is still trying to put the top back on the pressure cooker of information linking Juan Carlos I to corruption, and so news as important as the public prosecutors' decision to investigate him is either hidden in the corners of newspaper front pages or left off altogether. Foreign newspapers end up talking about it more than Spanish ones and European journalists naively ask why this should be. Could anyone, in any country around us, imagine that an investigation into the man who was their king and head of state for 39 years could go so under-reported? Well, in Spain it happens. Could anyone imagine that their two majority parties of the left and right (in Spain's case, the PSOE and PP) would oppose a parliamentary investigation into such an affair? Well, in Spain it happens. Could anyone imagine that the head of state who has succeeded him would offer no explanation and nor has he been asked to do anything beyond making a small statement asserting his own innocence? Well, in Spain it happens.
Justice in Spain is not the same for everyone. We already knew that and have been able to verify it during the trial of the Catalan independence leaders. Only in a country where concepts such as democracy, justice and freedom are as fuzzy as in Spain do the ghosts of the past weight more heavily than hypothetical crimes that are committed. The Spanish royal family's corruption has imploded the state at an important moment, when the institutional crisis is combining with the economic crisis, the political crisis with the territorial crisis, the leadership crisis with the explosion of the far right and the first coalition government with a rebellion by those in uniform, in defence of their particular vision of Spain. Spain is unraveling while the prime minister is taking the first opportunity he can to get tangled in an unbridled race which does not seem to be leading anywhere.
Only a parliamentary commission of inquiry would save the parties, which are at serious risk of collapsing with the system. Unidas Podemos has announced a proposal to investigate Juan Carlos I in Congress and even Vox says that he has to submit himself to justice "like one more citizen", leaving the party's position on the commission of inquiry in the air. The pro-independence groups and other minority parties have already repeated their call for a commission. The PP and PSOE would form a majority, certainly, but would their only alliance in a long time be justifiable to protect an investigation into corruption? It's hard to think that the answer would not be yes if they have nothing to hide or to fear.