The PP now dictates prison sentences

That the Popular Party has a patrimonial conception of justice (of institutions in general, but of justice in particular: let's remember Ignacio Cosidó in his stage as a senator, boasting that the party controlled —it's just an example— the second chamber of the Supreme Court “through the back door”) is a well-known fact. This week, however, the PP has taken, in its capacity as a popular accuser, a step on this hitherto unprecedented path: dictating what the prison sentence should be for an accused person in an ongoing trial. And accusing the Prosecutor's Office of being “subject to the government” when it refuses to comply with its dictate.This is what happened with the businessman (we accept businessman as a euphemism) Victor de Aldama. The PP made it known to the public that it considers the appropriate sentence for this character to be five years in prison, a sentence that would precisely allow him to avoid entering a penitentiary institution by resorting to a couple of technicalities (technicalities, and pardon the joke). The Prosecutor's Office immediately replied no, that it requests seven years, as it had already established in its brief. The PP's response, in the words of Feijóo himself, is that the Prosecutor's Office has thus dashed the right of any person who collaborates with justice to obtain penal benefits in exchange for this collaboration.The “collaboration” of this Aldama with justice has so far consisted of appearing before judges and operating a fan for seven hours that spread lies, fabrications, half-truths, and some true facts, all mixed in any way, with a whiff of a biased and prefabricated narrative that is astonishing, and verbalized with an unacceptable and barroom language. That Feijóo (and not someone of lower rank within the party) comes out in his defense means that Aldama is a VIP, a piece considered key within the strategy that the PP has designed to harass and bring down the hated Pedro Sánchez, and with him his government. Aldama, let's remember, is an accused person in an ongoing trial: that a political party goes to the extreme of indicating what sentence can be imposed on him is a serious attempt to interfere with justice.We must assume that it does not come from here: in the case for which Aldama is accused, the former minister and former organization secretary of the PSOE, José Luis Ábalos, faces a request for 24 years in prison for crimes very similar to those committed by Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner, who not only did not go to prison but also caused the dismissal of the State Prosecutor General Álvaro García Ortiz and received compensation of ten thousand euros for damages to his honor. The conclusions are self-evident, and the socialists have no right to complain much, because the practice of judicial dirty warfare dates back a long way and the PSOE did very little to prevent it.Be that as it may, for a party to dare to say what sentences should be handed down in a judicial process that is still open, even as a popular accuser, is more than worrying. If this is a party that claims to be fit to govern (and it is), the ways of its future government can only be authoritarian.