The "write it down and won't forget" ones
The serious noise of the slow armoured doors that close behind the prisoners, the walls, the plastic sheeting, the counts, the isolation, is left behind. And it is good news. With a face of happiness or a serious one, debating on what role to adopt after the pardon, the nine pro-independence politicians sentenced by the Supreme Court are on the street. In Belgium, Puigdemont, Comín and Puig, and Clara Ponsatí in Scotland, maintain the European legal pulse and await a sentence that allows them to put Spanish justice in evidence and pave the way for their return. Jaume Asens' strategy of promoting the reform of the crime of sedition is advancing and could bring the solution closer for the exiles, whom today a part of the Spanish judiciary and politics would like to see imprisoned and then throw the key to the sea.
With pro-independence politicians out of prison, there are no conditions not to openly lay the cards on the table and see what the reality is in a country that almost four years after October 2017 is not the same. The 52% of the Catalan Parliament shows that sovereignism is now a majority; that Jordi Sànchez and Pere Aragonès closed a government agreement gives it the capacity for action; but the strength of the street has been wasted and it is unknown whether the capacity for indignation is maintained in a society that has felt abused, deceived or frustrated by politics to varying degrees.
For the moment, injustice continues to act as a binder, as in the case of the abuse of power by the Court of Auditors, an administrative body rooted in political vengeance, capable of continuing to ruin public servants for acts more typical of freedom of expression in its function of government than of the misuse of public funds, as it would have us believe.
The release from prison is not an act of cowardice, as it is interpreted by those who think that "worse is better", but of justice and political realism. Pedro Sánchez, a survivor, knows that his parliamentary majority goes through the Basque and Catalan pro-independence partners. He also knows that first comes the pronouncement of the Council of Europe and then the Court of Strasbourg. Perhaps he also knows that the appropriation of Spanish nationalism by the most extreme right can only change with a transforming epic and a federalising constitutionalism of Spain. An unrealised bet with which he hopes to deactivate a part of Catalan independence.
The Inquisition
The decision of the pardons is a way of making a virtue out of necessity and has excited the Spanish Holy Inquisition, which has started a hunt for disaffected people that besieges bishops, businessmen and anyone willing to listen to the reasons of others, to modulate the opinion of the dogmatists.
Leading the Savonarola, José María Aznar, the Iraq War man, who points out traitors with his usual bitterness speaking of days that should be "written down and not forgotten" and who insists on the attempt to delegitimise the socialist government saying that "the PSOE has come to government, at least twice, in very special circumstances: once in 2004, as a result of terrorist attacks used to affect the credibility of the government; the other with a vote of no confidence with the support of separatists and exterrorists". Also within the Episcopal Conference Omella and the support for pardons is pointed out when the Archbishop of Oviedo Sanz Montes reminds that "the unity of our people is a moral good".
Evidently, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, who speaks of "appeasement" and "identity involution in which Sánchez and separatism converge", joins the heart of beatas. The woman who failed in Catalonia demands to impose "constitutionalism" even if it is "by Christian compassion, so that the head of the CEOE stops whining, and the bishops stop promoting atheism and destroying devotions".
With the PP in the mountains, how can the Constitution be reformed as the negotiation with Catalonia would demand?
Blocked
Pere Aragonès and Pedro Sánchez will meet on Tuesday in this context. They have two years to see how much they can do to transform Spain and what degree of patience and mobilisation the independence movement has, which is not imposing itself above all others but does not seem to have to back down either.
The real obstacles will be seen now when the negotiating table shows how far apart the positions are and how irreconcilable they are today. The Catalan sovereigntist majority has not come this far to achieve either a new system of mediocre financing or a reform of the Constitution that is acceptable to a PP that lives off anti-Catalanism. The obstacles are enormous and the only advantage is that now Barcelona can no longer be bombed every forty years.
