There is no shortage of justifications for the indictment which the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) politician Diana Riba has astutely made, over what was and continues to be a true case of lawfare: the persecution of the Catalan independence movement. There are exiles, political prisoners, thousands of people in different judicial cases, and, as it happens, an amnesty law over whose publication in Spain's official state gazette the Socialist (PSOE) government is dragging its feet, in a self-interested move with regard to a law approved in the Congress of Deputies under an urgent procedure. And there are also Supreme Court prosecutors who argue that the amnesty cannot be applied to president Carles Puigdemont and those convicted of misuse of public funds in the 2019 leaders' trial. All this while they are trying to open new cases that are not covered by the amnesty law, and within these, the surprising and highly frivolous appearance, of crimes of terrorism.
It's a case of anything goes and this situation is not comparable, however you look at it, to Pedro Sánchez's melodrama, whose limits will be seen in due course, since for the moment it is only about a summons as a person investigated by a Madrid court. Riba explained that, from her own experience, she is familiar with the actions of the Spanish justice system. In her own public letter - a happy return to the epistolary tradition of the past although it may be fleeting - she reminds Sánchez that this is the first campaign as a candidate for ERC in the European elections that she can embark upon with "relative normalcy", since her partner, Raül Romeva, "whom I also love madly, spent 1,221 days in prison for holding a referendum." And she does not spare the Socialist leader a sucker punch: of the total days that Romeva spent in prison, as the MEP explains, he spent 33 under the PP government of Mariano Rajoy and 1,188 under a Socialist government "led by you".
Any of the spouses of the pro-independence political prisoners could have told a story similar to Riba's. And I would also share her final conclusion, which, on the other hand, is applicable to all parties: that the PSOE is not what it says, it is what it votes for. It could also be added that it is what it does. And sometimes, even, what it did and the trail that it left. This Wednesday, the Constitutional Court, in one of these curiously-timed sleights of hand to which we are already accustomed, has unanimously approved the constitutional appeal lodged by the Catalan Socialists (PSC) that asked to nullify the agreements passed by Bureau of the Catalan Parliament on 18th and 19th April 2023, which approved a system so that the exiled minister Lluís Puig, an MP in Parliament then, and again in the new legislature, could vote.
'The PSOE is not what it says, it is what it votes for': and it could also be added that it is what it does, and sometimes, even, what it did and the trail that it left.
As a solution, Parliament pushed for a transitory electronic vote to allow Puig to participate, but this has been short-circuited. By extension, it can be understood that the system is not valid for Puigdemont either. All of this, five days before the constitution of the new Bureau of Parliament on Monday afternoon, is a further complication in the party pacts that are being negotiated. It should help facilitate an agreement between Together for Catalonia (Junts) and ERC, but in Catalan politics nothing is clear and the fog is always thick. The PSC denounced that the Bureau's system was a clumsy measure that only sought to breach the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. They were not without reason, but in politics things come back like a boomerang and always at the most inopportune moment. I don't know what the PSC deputies would be doing now if it thought that this would explode this week; although I suppose they would look the other way. It would have been the smartest response.