The non-inclusion of Mariano Rajoy in the Socialist (PSOE) party's list of people from whom it seeks testimony before the Spanish Congress's commission of inquiry addressing Operation Catalonia is, although not surprising, very bad news. Why is the PSOE keeping its head down after the multitude of news reports confirming that the Spanish government established a network of police officers and the "sewers of the state" to spread fake news about the Catalan independence movement? What is the party that now governs Spain doing, looking the other way, when it is known that the order to carry out irregular, and therefore illegal, investigations to discredit many of the movement's leaders came from the highest levels of the government of the day? I know that there can only be one answer: for motives of mutual protection in so-called matters of state over which the party in charge knows that it can count on the loyalty of the opposition.
The criticisms we do hear are about the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, the law of 'Only yes means yes', the return or not to his position in command of the Civil Guard of general Pérez de los Cobos, the 'Tito Berni' case or any of the countless episodes of corruption that haunt them. But when it comes to the unity of Spain, the political response to those years was given by the People's Party (PP) government, and the PSOE endorsed it behind the scenes with pacts that have not yet been fully explained, but which included a commitment that has been unchanged since the beginning of the transition: in this, we are together and we will not go much beyond what is strictly necessary. So it is, and so it will be.
Just as it was, in another serious chapter of history, when the facts began to emerge over the state's dirty war against the terrorist organization ETA and the appearance of the GAL death squads. The PP, with Manuel Fraga at its head, avoided confrontation with Felipe González and the debate about the so-called Mr X who authorized it. Later, José María Aznar kept his hands off as news broke and things became known, and he focused more on Socialist corruption than on the GAL. This understanding between the PSOE and PP on these issues has always had a wide margin of disagreement, but neither of them have positioned themselves as opposed to it all. In this new case, it will not be any different, and Operation Catalunya will be born in a tight corset if it does not have among its participants, from Rajoy downwards, all the protagonists of those years, with deputy PM Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría at the head and those responsible for the CNI intelligence agency since 2012 when general Félix Sanz Roldán was at the helm.
Blocking it up with Jorge Fernández Díaz and María Dolores de Cospedal is, politically speaking, a fraud. Everyone knows that the former head of interior, Fernández Díaz, shared any decision on Catalonia, no matter how small, with the prime minister and most of the time, with Jorge Moragas, the PM's chief of staff, born in Barcelona and currently ambassador to Tanzania. In this circle made up of the most trusted confidants in those years there was also, until the end of 2016, José Manuel García-Margallo, who fell from grace over his talkativeness, the confrontation with Soraya and personal ambitions.
It remains to be seen whether, despite the fact that the PSOE has not asked for certain key figures to appear, it ends up voting for those that the Catalan pro-independence groups put on the table or, instead, hides behind the inevitable lack of consensus that will occur. It would be a way to enter the topic via the back door, but would provide a minimal hope that new lines of investigation might be traced and that progress in confirming the persecution of those years will not be prevented.