President Illa has assured that the agreement on the airport governance of Catalonia is imminent and that the Government's presence in decision-making and in the planning of major infrastructure is assured. Good news, as the precedents are not very encouraging. The Spanish and Basque governments agreed at the end of March on Euskadi's participation in the management of Euskadi's airports. Although, according to the lehendakari, the agreement included the creation of a bilateral body as an "instrument of collaboration, coordination and management" and the capacity to issue binding reports, the Ministry of Transport was quick to deny it. Today, the president of AENA, Maurici Lucena, told the general shareholders' meeting that there would be no transfers and that co-management is an "impossible" demand.In reality, the creation of a body formed by the Spanish and Catalan governments with the capacity to manage airports of general interest presents no technical problem, but rather a political will issue. As the Constitutional Court has recalled (STC 68/1984, 204/2002), it would be ideal if it were done through an organic law of transfer, since these types of airports are the exclusive competence of the State. José María Aznar limited himself to modifying an ordinary law such as the State Ports Law of 1992 to cede the management of ports and create a shared management body (Law 62/1997), and no one complained.That it is a political issue is also demonstrated by the fact that airports are more of a lucrative business than a transport infrastructure: they are a first-class factor in economic development and territorial revitalization, whose impact is estimated at between 2 and 3% of GDP and at 3,000 direct jobs per million passengers. Therefore, not only territories but also cities show a growing interest in playing a relevant role in their management. On the contrary, the Spanish airport management model, designed in 1990 with the creation of AENA, continues to be a radial model that revolves around this highly centralized entity, which acts as airport manager, service provider, and even regulator.Thus, while what works in the world are formulas for airports to operate as competing companies, in Spain, under the pretext that they are of general interest, they are networked. Minister Óscar Puente insisted on this the day before yesterday in a debate in Congress. This fact may have some logic in Finland, where Helsinki airport concentrates more than 90% of the traffic, but not in Spain, where the airport with the most volume (Barajas) concentrates around 20%.

When the French Parliament established by law in 2010 the first ban on the full-face veil in Europe, it was said that the Republic "could not be lived with a veiled face." vivre ensembleThis led the French legislator to declare, in the preamble to the law, that "no one may, in public spaces, wear clothing intended to conceal their face." Therefore, the basis for this prohibition was not so much the classic argument of republican secularism—invoked years earlier to eradicate the veil from schools—as a factor linked to security and public order: the fact that people cannot mask their identity behind a garment. This is not a new idea. In school, we learned about the famous Squillace riot, the popular uprising that took place in Madrid during the reign of Charles III, motivated, among other things, by the prohibition of wearing long capes and wide-brimmed hats that concealed the face.

According to the ICPS annual survey, 52.4% of Catalans are in favor of immigration, but Two-thirds want to limit their accessPerhaps due to the "agenda" effect caused by the poisoned political debate. The hardening of domestic opinion coincides with the trend toward favoring deportations in other countries, a policy that has proven unsuccessful. During his first term, Donald Trump pledged to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants to the United States each year to eliminate a third of the estimated 11 million in the country. The final tally was 1.2 million formal deportations (removals(with a deportation order). A failure, considering that it was surpassed by Obama (2,749,706 in eight years). This can be explained by several reasons: first, because immigration policy depends on cooperation between federal, state, and local authorities, who, in many cases—in sanctuary cities and states—refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known by the terrifying acronym ICE, and also ran into trouble with the issuing authorities. The system's collapse was significant: there were not enough immigration judges or administrative resources to prevent the enormous delays in processing.

In Democracy in AmericaAlexis de Tocqueville said that in the United States, power manifests itself in society because Americans do not obey a man but the law. Of course, the French thinker and minister had that impression almost 200 years ago, when the Caesarist drift of the virtuous American political system in the hands of Donald Trump had not yet begun. One wonders: where are the famous checks and balances and the watchdogs?watchdog) who had historically denounced abuses of power in that country?

The scandals surrounding the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), involving corruption and instances of gender-based harassment, are not only deeply concerning because they call into question the integrity of the political system and undermine public trust, but also foreshadow an increasingly likely shift in power towards the far right. To this context must be added judicial decisions incompatible with the rule of law, to put it mildly. Some experts, such as former magistrate José Antonio Martín Pallín, have openly spoken of judicial coups. The most grotesque recent episode has been the Supreme Court's ruling that convicted former Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz after a highly substandard investigation. The five justices who voted in favor of the conviction belong to the most conservative wing of the judiciary.

The Republican, EH Bildu, EAJ-PNV, BNG, Comuns, Compromís, and Más per Mallorca groups have presented a bill to guarantee genuine multilingualism in Spain by correcting the monolingual bias of state institutions and ensuring citizens' effective right to communicate in any official language. This is a commitment made by the PSOE when the Congress of Deputies was constituted in August 2023, similar to promoting the institutionalization of Catalan in the EU, but implemented more slowly and with the advantage that it only depends on majorities in the Spanish Parliament.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled in favor of the Spanish justice system for restricting the political rights of Jordi Sánchez, Jordi Turull, and Oriol Junqueras following their imprisonment for the October 1st referendum and the December 2017 elections. The Strasbourg court's decision, supported by Supreme Court Justice Pablo Llarena, found that the three leaders violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights and its protocols. The ruling aligns with the Spanish Constitutional Court's assessment that there was sufficient evidence to suspect serious crimes. This is despite the fact that, as the UN Human Rights Committee stated, the leaders had called on citizens to demonstrate peacefully, and isolated acts of violence could not be attributed to them.

Bad times for Catalan, also in public administrations. A judge of the administrative court of Barcelona has applied a rigorous The proportionality test regarding the requirement of a B2 level of Catalan to work as a cemetery worker in Vic is problematic, even though it is an upper-intermediate (or advanced-intermediate) level, which, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), means that you are able to express yourself fluently in everyday and professional situations without difficulty. This is the same requirement established in the terms of the call for applications for two multi-skilled driver positions at the Catalan Parliament, which are also being challenged.

"A government without a budget is a government that governs nothing," said Pedro Sánchez in March 2018. And in November 2022, Salvador Illa reproached Pere Aragonès for "Catalonia not having an approved budget given everything that's happening in the world." Of course, circumstances have changed; both were in the opposition then and are in power today. Now the Spanish president deludedly says he will fulfill his obligation, and the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, asserts that if there is no budget, "the world won't end, nor will Catalonia fall." These are two different ways of getting by, marked one by the optimism of the will and the other by the pessimism of reason, as Gramsci would say.

It seems that Pedro Sánchez, who has seen how His family environment is besieged by a judicial uproar Instigated by the far right, she finally fell off her high horse like a Saint Paul and realized that "there are judges playing politics" who are doing "terrible harm" to the judiciary. At some point, the Spanish left will have to acknowledge—and not in a television interview—that the Transition did not represent any "break" with the judiciary of the previous autocratic regime and that the "reforms" implemented in the 1980s were so weak that they have hindered it in terms of full liberal democracy.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has heard firsthand the arguments for and against amnesty during two hearings devoted to examining the preliminary questions submitted by the Court of Auditors and the National Court, as provided for in Article 257 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. We have had to come this far because the Spanish political and judicial right, despite this being an eminently domestic issue, decided some time ago to take its private war to all possible continental bodies, as before to the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, in order to delay—rather than make it illusory.

Pedro Sánchez is expected to propose a series of measures to combat corruption. We'll see. There's a danger of approaching the phenomenon as if it were a problem of greed or lack of integrity on the part of various politicians or officials, given that the proliferation of cases is due to a combination of factors: the long-standing culture of corruption that has characterized Spanish (and Catalan) politics during long periods of non-democracy, and oligarchies due to the prevailing neoliberal economic model—which has forged a series of counter-values that make it more efficient to accept a certain degree of transgression if it acts as a lever for material progress.

As it seems, the Ábalos/Cerdán/Koldo case is on its way to having more episodes than Nizaga of powerEvery day, more evidence emerges, or statements are made in court, in which, incidentally, the suspects don't even recognize their voices, as is well known. Rail or road infrastructure projects were awarded to three large companies that were regularly the beneficiaries.

The latest failure to demand official status for Catalan in the European Union leaves us with a list—apparently dynamic and evolving—of member states in favor and against, as well as those who seem to be limiting themselves to expressing doubts, and also a most grotesque episode: the efforts of Feijóo's Popular Party to torpedo this recognition by pressuring several conservative and far-right European heads of government.

One of the most shocking aspects of the latest CIS survey is that the judiciary is the second-highest-rated Spanish institution, and that all the suspicions about its lack of neutrality are concentrated on its actions regarding political parties. We learned this precisely the same week that the Supreme Court denied, first, amnesty to Carles Puigdemont, delusionally claiming that he obtained a "personal benefit of a financial nature" from the trial, and that this fits in a very twisted way within the disgraceful and avoidable exception provided for by the amnesty law. Second, the same high court has ruled against a pardon for Oriol Junqueras, which could exonerate him from his disqualification from office because, in the opinion of such learned judges, and contrary to the opinion of the Prosecutor's Office, that would be tantamount to replacing the partial and irrevocable pardon granted for another prison sentence for his 1870 prison term.

Over the years, it has been demonstrated that, in autonomous states, state investments play a significant role both in shaping public policies and in rewarding or punishing individual territories based, first, on whether they are approved, and then on whether they are implemented. These days we have learned According to the General State Intervention (IGAE), during the first half of 2024 only 20% was spent in Catalonia, 456 million euros, which is at the bottom of all the autonomous communities, while in Madrid, for example, the figure exceeds 57%, with 694 million euros.

With the blood the northern fiscal hawks made us sweat during the financial crisis and the effort it took to mobilize resources to confront the COVID pandemic, now in four days the EU Commission has decided to unleash €800 billion to address the security problems caused by Donald Trump's madness. The difference with the first crisis is that this time the dictates come not only from the European troika that imposed austerity after the 2008 financial crisis, but also from NATO and the US, which combine the fears of some countries bordering Putin's Russia with the classic American demands for greater austerity. The difference with the effort made during the pandemic crisis is that now there isn't a single euro of free subsidies; the loans are reduced to €150 billion, and each government must contribute the remainder. The only advantage, which is saying something, is that the champions of Lutheran frugality are now willing to modify the budget stability targets so that all defensive "investment" does not count toward the deficit and debt ceilings.

Now it turns out that not only the AVE (High Speed Train) is radial. The Cercanías (Commuter Trains) also have a departure and arrival point at km 0 of Puerta del Sol, if we take into account the refusal of Renfe's workers' unions to comply with the transfer agreement between the Generalitat (Catalan Government) and the State. This is yet another example of the defense of a Jacobin model of public service disguised as a demand for social rights that have never been in question. The Spain of the autonomous state does not resonate with the polycentric mentality that prevails in other composite states or in the EU itself. The centripetal drive of the political and economic elites of Spain with a Castilian-Andalusian matrix, and the definitive consolidation of Madrid, do not allow even Barcelona to be the Frankfurt or Milan of Spain. The dream of many federalists is buried, as is the tacit pact referred to by Antoni de Capmany in the Cortes of Cádiz, whereby Castile had to conduct politics while Catalonia was allowed to conduct business.

The motion of censure interruptus Ripoll has once again highlighted the difficulty that some traditional parties have in relating to emerging far-right or populist political forces, whether they are Islamophobic or tap into the frustrations caused by the deterioration of the prosperity of the working classes due to the abandonment of the elites. I do not mean to say that some of Junts' reasons for not supporting the motion of censure should not be considered, because they are somewhere between the doubts that this type of uncomfortable situation can generate and the omnipresent partisan calculation between forces that form an electoral border, although it may generate incomprehension. That is how crude politics is.