It was only necessary to listen to José María Aznar last Sunday night on La Sexta, hear his characterisation of what happened in Catalonia in October 2017 as a "coup d'état" or his categorical refusal to agree to pardoning the political prisoners, to reach the conclusion that the Spanish state has no plan B for Catalonia and that any attempt to normalize public life is impossible. The only path he contemplates is that of surrender and acceptance of a return to the past, to the Spain of the autonomies as we have known it. Aznar no longer rules, and in many ways he is just a caricature of the person who governed between 1996 and 2004. But his way of understanding the state is by no means a minority one: from the judiciary to the military, from senior officials to the Council of State, from the Court of Accounts to the Supreme Court, the monolithic vision of Spain is the only one that is accorded any status.
Pedro Sánchez, so quick with other kinds of issues that have to do with the left-right axis, has begun to tell us what his candidate Salvador Illa meant when he spoke of a period of reencounter in Catalonia and of turning a page. That was his plan B, if he had got a majority government in place, which has not happened. We now know that Plan B was a fake and that there was no change from the Plan A of repression of independence, destabilization of political life and the use of state resources to act against governors and politicians of a particular ideology. The complaint laid by prosecutors against the speaker of the Catalan Parliament, Roger Torrent, and three MPs on its procedural body, the Bureau - deputy speaker Josep Costa, plus Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado - who accepted a motion from Junts, ERC and the CUP in response to the sentences of the 2019 pro-independence leaders' trial, marks the jump, the turning point at the start of the new Catalan legislature. The public prosecutors who, Pedro Sánchez boasted, depended on his control, showed their teeth once Madrid found that alternative governments to a pro-independence grouping were only backroom machinations, as the real arithmetic was enormously stubborn.
The prosecutors accuse them of disobedience of judicial authority for including the proposal in the debate and deliberation in the plenary session of Parliament on November 12th, 2019, which, according to article 410 of the Penal Code, could mean up to two years of special disqualification from holding public office. We will see now how much of a path this has before it in the Catalan High Court (TSJC), but prosecutors De Gregorio and Assumpta Pujol have put on the pressure just at the moment when the Bureau from the last legislature is about to transfer its functions to the next one, to be chosen next week, when the new Parliament is constituted.
The second example of the 'reencounter' was the presentation of the appeal against the 'Level 3' open prison regimes of former parliamentary speaker Carme Forcadell and ex-minister Dolors Bassa. In this case, in the face of a penitentiary court's opposition to withdraw the open regime, prosecutors have filed an appeal in the second chamber of Spain's Supreme Court, the sentencing court of the pro-independence leaders. So the ball is already in the court which has reversed all the decisions taken on this procedure in Catalonia: that is, in front of judge Manuel Marchena. There is nothing to suggest that this time it is will be any different from previous occasions and that the Supreme Court might not end up cancelling the decision of the penitentiary court. The countdown has begun for the return of political prisoners to their respective jails. Aznar was also right.
And the latest court report of the day has to do with the possibility of pardoning the prisoners, which the Spanish government trots out at its convenience. Now, the Supreme Court has asked the Court of Auditors for a report on whether the prisoners have deposited the public money which they allegedly misused on the 1st October referendum - a total of 4.1 million euros, according to the court. A new ball to be kicked forward while the State Solicitors, which also need to have their say, remain silent. And the clock keeps ticking. How can one respond to all this? If the 'reencounter' was this, the least that can be said is that the word was not the most appropriate.