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 to one of the darkest episodes in the current Spanish democratic era. 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 incurred the crime of crimes against 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, nevertheless, it 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 extended 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 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 also through all the political leaders who in some way have promoted or given cover to the absurdity. The Spanish state has gambled its democratic credibility, already in itself quite inconsistent, and reached the point of descending to the category of flawed democracy (instead of the one for full democracy, where it is usually found) in the year 2021 in the Democracy Index of The Economist. That those responsible for all this now emerge with complete impunity is nothing short of unjust, and gives an effectively melancholy varnish to the moment the amnesty is applied.

It is also caused by the disappointing drift, or involution, of a significant part of the independence movement throughout these nine years. In order to overcome what they call the lily in the hand, the woke and the do-goodism, many have decided to militate in what must be bad-ism, which in practice is a retreat (they call it rearmament, because they are very combative) that includes xenophobia and anti-immigration discourse, supremacism, classism, aporophobia, lately a tailor-made small-proprietorism, and also, in 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 was simply disappearing. After these nine years, when some say they will do it again, it is hard to know exactly what they are referring to.