The dirty judicial war, or lawfareIt's hardly news in Spain anymore. Let's be clear: it makes headlines and leads the news, but it's anything but a secret or a surprise. Various prosecutors and judges, whose ethics still allow them to feign outrage at what is truly a scandal and unfolds before everyone's eyes, acknowledge its existence, more or less openly. The latest case is the conviction of Álvaro García Ortiz, the former Attorney General of Spain, whose sentence was delayed for almost three weeks and whose legal reasoning has once again left at least the progressive wing of the Spanish judiciary in awe. The fact that the conviction stems from a power struggle between the prosecution and the partner of the President of the Community of Madrid makes it all sadly understandable. That Ayuso is untouchable, having weathered several scandals that should have had legal consequences (during the pandemic alone: the sale of medical masks, the rushed construction of the Isabel Zendal hospital, the deaths of over seven thousand people in Madrid's nursing homes due to the so-called "protocols of shame"; she should testify) is a well-known fact. We now know that her boyfriend and her advisor are also untouchable.
As in the trial of the Process, the Supreme Court's sentence against García Ortiz considers a crime an act that was not (the publication of a press release: for the reader who is not familiar with the case, we refer you to the very extensive newspaper archive on the subject). Also as in that case, the general tone of the text gives off that Ortega-esque whiff of Spain and I are like that, ma'am.That type of fatalism, according to which things are as they are and cannot be otherwise, is found at the very ideological foundation of Spanish nationalism.
The Spanish justice system is mired in the banal nationalism described long ago by Michael Billig, so most of its leaders don't even realize they are practicing nationalist justice. It's legal action to defend the status quo, a system of power they call the homeland. What these people call "Spain," and how often they speak of it, is nothing more than a system of privileges of which they are, in turn, both custodians and direct beneficiaries.
Figures like Judge Marchena, who even feels entitled to arbitrarily place his daughter within the judiciary, or Judge Lamela, who sent the Jordis to pretrial detention without cause after listening to them testify while looking at her phone, clearly do not operate from the concept of justice as a public service, as an instrument for the common good. Yet they occupy the highest positions in the judiciary, and from there they feel entitled to dismiss everyone from private citizens (except if they are the partner of a PP leader) to state attorneys general or presidents of the Generalitat. When we speak of coups d'état from within the institutions, this is precisely what we mean.
