Well, fancy that. Spain's patriotic police, so often said to have been behind operations against Catalonia, not only existed, but still have the same spring in their step. The Catalan independence movement already knew this, and has done since at least 2012. Now the government of Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias also knows it and is suffering as a result, as the Spanish prime minister himself stated during Wednesday's session of Congress of Deputies. The so-called "sewers of the state" that have carried out so many services in the name of maintaining the unity of Spain at all costs have ended up becoming a problem and a monster with a life of its own. It is almost poetic justice to hear Pedro Sánchez explain from the parliamentary lectern that the offensive by the right and the deep state - which, through some sectors of the Civil Guard, are challenging interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska - is due to the fact that Marlaska is the member of the executive who is fighting to dismantle the so-called patriotic police.
Nothing more would need to be added to this, except to regret the time lost in reaching this conclusion, were it not for the enormous evil done and the personal and political lives truncated along the way. Everything done in the name of the state, inside or outside the law. This seems to have been, in practice, the culmination of the dark years of the Spanish interior ministry, the seed of which has not yet been eradicated today. So what happens now? Very easy: ministers are going to feel the pressure of legal proceedings against them, whose initial sensations are known — treated as joking matters, of low importance — but whose final consequences are not known. The management of the coronavirus crisis and the demonstration of March 8th in Madrid is a storm cloud which is still approaching, as the Madrid courts open up the issue, and it does not look good. Apart from that affair, there are other cases presented in other courts that we will hear about. In Catalonia we have seen impossible things like the Jordis being sentenced to nine years in prison and, at present, having been there for almost 1,000 days. They did nothing to deserve this punishment, but there they still are, in Lledoners prison. Conclusion: anything could happen.
Spanish politics has exploded and Sanchez and Iglesias are seeing that having a government is a very different thing from having power. Aznar was, perhaps, the last Spanish prime minister to have both, and since then, Zapatero, Rajoy, and Sánchez have clearly been in another league. While part of the Spanish government is struggling to dismantle the patriotic police and another is trying to stay as far away as possible from the legal consequences of how the pandemic was managed, there is also the Dina case focused on a former adviser to Pablo Iglesias, an affair that could put the deputy PM in difficulties. The matter is currently in the hands of the National Audience court and will be elevated to the Supreme Court, which will have to ask the Congress of Deputies for permission to try an MP.
All the strings are being pulled together to shift politics out of its usual patch, which ends is generally the government and the Congress of Deputies. If we add in the economic crisis and the mistakes that have been made, of which there are more than a few, the autumn does not present itself as being easy for the Sánchez executive. And to top it all, not a day goes by when the prime minister does not perform some Houdini act, convinced that he has so many lives he will never exhaust them.