The Cerdán case, with all its dense and toxic dust, has allowed the Spanish right to finally raise a banner it had long championed: the fight against corruption. They have spent years inventing or inflating scandals with no evidence other than the fake news published in far-right media outlets, propped up by judges and prosecutors who did not hesitate to use the justice system as a political weapon. It is precisely corruption, and of the worst kind, the fraudulent use of the courts and the mendacious manipulation of journalism to destroy political adversaries. However, these are practices that have been common in Spain for the last thirteen or fourteen years, as the Catalan separatists and political forces to the left of the PSOE, such as Podemos and Sumar, are well aware. Defamation, slander, fake news, and false evidence are part of the news diet and the journalistic agenda. What was new with Pedro Sánchez was that these weapons were used against a Spanish prime minister, who was initially denied even the legitimacy to hold office. It was a dirty and dangerous game, but to a certain extent irrelevant as long as no dirt appeared in the presidential environment.
Finally, it has appeared, and it has done so in a horrifying way, with a new spectacle of vulgarity worthy of the days of the chalet orgies of the Gürtel scandal or Luis Roldán's adventures in Laos. This has had the effect of lending a patina of credibility to the previous accusations, however false they were, and of minimizing the corruption of the PP, which still today drags down a string of pending or falsely closed cases (starting with the one affecting the party's headquarters on Génova Street in Madrid, paid for with black money), and the Vox case has already been paid for with black money); irregular and with stories as edifying as that of the attack on Aleix Vidal-Quadras, related precisely to the source of the money.
It doesn't matter. Rightly or wrongly, the anti-corruption banner is now in the hands of the Spanish ultra-nationalist right. They have also embraced the banner of freedom, managing to establish the demagoguery according to which the left prohibits, while the right makes life easier for people, even at the price of falling into anti-scientific, denialist, or discriminatory rhetoric. The flag of Spain, with all its weight as a national symbol, is of course also theirs, despite the clumsy efforts of the Spanish left to try to compete in this area. And pay attention, because the banners currently in dispute are those of feminism (with the slogan of not pitting women against men), Catalan and linguistic diversity (with the argument of "friendly bilingualism"), and environmental protection (which should not be incompatible with economic development). If the left slips a little further, the fourth of the banners will only be left with those of the most worn-out populisms.
