Melancholic return

The total amnesty for the leaders and those prosecuted in the Procés is excellent news that puts an end not certainly to the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain, but it does to one of the darkest episodes of the current Spanish democratic stage. The amnesty is for those who have suffered judicial, police, political, and media persecution for nine years, but it is above all an amnesty that the Spanish state grants to itself, after its powers have committed the crime of lese-democracy by persecuting citizens for ideological reasons. Beating citizens on public roads, imprisoning civic and political leaders, or forcing them into exile, criminalizing ideas, is incompatible with democracy, and yet that is exactly what happened in the Spanish state in 2017 and thereafter. If there was a coup d'état in Spain it was, as has been said and repeated, the one that began in 2010 with the Constitutional Court's ruling against the Statute and dragged on until this past Monday, when finally the stage of political repression against the Catalan independence movement could be considered closed. A coup d'état carried out from within the State and by servants of the State, at all levels of power: from the police to the monarchy, passing through the judges and prosecutors (Llarenas, Marchenas, Lamelas, Zaragozas, Madrigals) who have taken an active part in a long and unfortunate history of lawfare or dirty judicial war, naturally passing through all the political leaders who in some way have promoted or provided cover for the nonsense. The Spanish state has gambled with its democratic credibility, already quite inconsistent as it is, and reached the point of dropping to the category of flawed democracy (instead of that of full democracy, where it is usually found) in 2021 in the Democracy Index of The Economist. That those responsible for all this now emerge with complete impunity is nonetheless unfair, and gives an effectively melancholic varnish to the moment of the amnesty's application.

It is also caused by the disappointing drift, or involution, of a significant part of the independence movement over these nine years. In order to overcome what they call the lily-in-hand approach, the woke and the do-goodism, many have decided to militate in what must be the do-badism, which in practice is a retreat (they call it rearmament, because they are very battle-hardened) that includes xenophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric, supremacism, classism, aporophobia, lately a tailor-made small-proprietorism, and also, from an international perspective, Trumpism and Zionism favorable to a new world order that ranges from genocides to illegal wars or the overthrow of governments by force. This has happened within a part of Junts, which is Puigdemont's party, and also outside of Junts, while the left of ERC was transmuting into a party of order at the hands of the socialists and the transformative left of the CUP simply disappeared. After these nine years, when some say they will do it again, it is hard to know exactly what they are referring to.