Some constitutional patriots pretend to be scandalized because, they say, the King of Spain, as head of state, should not sit next to an attorney general accused in a judicial proceeding, as will happen this Friday at the opening ceremony of the judicial year in Spain. These patriots can relax, because in fact, the King himself doesn't seem to care as much as they do about the company with which he sits and takes photos. This very week, he was photographed, or rather, with Eduardo Inda, one of the most shameful figures in Spanish public life, and this is a highly contested league.
For some time now, indeed, Felipe VI has not bothered to hide his ideological sympathies for the ultra-nationalist right. Nor has he ever made an effort to hide it from a majority of the Spanish judicial leadership. Not so many years ago, there was complete harmony between the judiciary and the legislature, because both were fighting against what they called the independence coup, and back then, that very event (the opening of the judicial year) went smoothly. It was all invocations to the indissoluble unity of the Spanish homeland, and no one thought of investigating the then Attorney General, José Manuel Maza, when he was censured by Congress for covering up for prosecutor Manuel Moix, who had a fraudulent company in Panama. Or when Maza filed a complaint against the government of Carles Puigdemont with a title as impartial as "The harder the fall will be." On the contrary, the charge against the current Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, for the alleged crime of revealing secrets gives off a strong stench of scorch, explicitly described in the dissenting opinion of Supreme Court Justice Andrés Palomo, which is worded much longer and more detailed than the indictment.
The commotion and tension at the start of the judicial year do not, however, hide the validity of the total agreement between the majority associations of judges and prosecutors, the People's Party (PP) and Vox. That judges are playing politics in Spain is nothing new; only, when said by a besieged prime minister like Sánchez, it takes on another dimension and also becomes ammunition against him. There is no dissimulation in the desire to overthrow this president and the hated majority that keeps him in power. To achieve this, the political, judicial, and media right has decided to resort to mistletoe, which is the use of setting a trap smeared with glue so that the bird becomes hooked and cannot escape. The attack against Sánchez is greasy and toxic; what its perpetrators don't stop to consider (or, if they do, they are indifferent) is that the smearing will be so intense that the institutions they claim to defend will never be cleaned again. The critical voices? The answer was proudly summarized by the former interim president of the General Council of the Judiciary a couple of years ago: "Leave us alone!"Get used to treating public institutions as if they were your own farmhouse has these consequences.
