The European Parliament's decision to request that the Spanish judicial authorities investigate president Carles Puigdemont for alleged connections between the Catalan independence movement and Vladimir Putin's Russia, approved by a vote held this Thursday in the EU chamber with 433 votes in favour, 56 against and 18 abstentions, is alarming. This is mainly for two reasons: firstly, because a fake news story with no other basis than the sum of different conjectures, rumours and an obvious desire to hunt someone down has been used to serve up a campaign whose least important priority is to get to the truth. But, secondly, for the voracity with which the European institutions were discredited by the obscene interests of the People's Party (PP), engaged in a campaign to topple the government of Pedro Sánchez.
But the vote also reflects something else. Because although the proposal comes from the People's Party and all the conservative families have quickly aligned themselves with it, the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) either cannot or don't want to wrestle themselves free of this pressure and convince their co-religionists that the aspect of least interest to the PP is whether or not there are Russians involved, but rather, they are only interested in bringing down the Spanish government. Far from this, they feel intimidated, they shrink and end up voting with the right. Does this mean that the PSOE also sees this Russian plot in president Puigdemont's negotiations in those days of 2017? I guess not, because if that were the case, I don't know very well what course the Spanish legislature might take now.
If all this were true, justice would have launched the necessary cases to prove their suspicions years ago
Because the judges - in particular the justice of the National Audience, Manuel García-Castellón - are accusing Puigdemont of terrorism, and the prosecutors of the Supreme Court subscribed to this by 11 votes to 4 at the recent meeting of the court prosecutors. He also collaborated with the Russians to destabilize the European Union, according to the PP deputies' version. If all this were true, justice would have launched the necessary cases to prove their suspicions years ago. But since they know that none of it is true, they have conveniently kept it in a drawer, without making any accusations, and only put it on the table after the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and the announcement of the processing of an amnesty law. The fact that the MEPs state in the resolution as passed their extreme concern for the "possible relations" between Catalan independentism and the Russian administration, along with "the large-scale disinformation campaigns that Russia has promoted in Catalonia" - these things are, first and foremost, a defeat of the truth.
It is not difficult to coincide with president Puigdemont in his reflections on what happened this Thursday in the European chamber, and also in the striking headline of an article he published and which can be read in ElNacional.cat: If we had made Feijóo prime minister, all this would not be happening. Unfortunately, in Catalonia we know how disinformation campaigns are constructed, and you only need to read some of the scurrilous information that is being published about the functioning and the methods used by the PP government in Operation Catalonia. We knew it, and there are documents and recordings that prove it, years later. The method is always the same: dirty war, patriotic police, lies, use of the 'state sewers'. Anything goes and nothing is precluded. There is only rule: the end justifies the means. And so, step by step, accusations are made, again and again. The right to a defence disappears. And the accusation sounds like the truth, but in fact it is nothing but a big lie.