This is the last analysis of the season and, therefore, it is time to take stock. If we talk about moods, we arrive at the holidays worried because many folders have not been closed: the amnesty has not yet reached the exiles or the main disqualified individuals, the new financing system is very slow, almost as slow as the improvement of the Rodalies service or the Adif works, and the education system in Catalonia, which left for the holidays amidst strikes and will begin equally amidst protests, has hit rock bottom with the discrediting of the Department of Education and the lamentable final episode of the PISA tests. It only remains for us to know that the ministry warned the department in April 2025 (and not, as had been said, in March 2026), that there was a very high student exclusion rate, but the warning went from technicians to technicians and they did not communicate it to the top of the political sphere. Why? It is not known and this fuels suspicions that since the results of the tests would be very bad, no one wanted to take responsibility for the hot potato. In fact, the explanations were given at the end of July, late and poorly, and it is all a jumble of inconcisions about departments that were being reformed or the coincidence with other tests. All this does not generate confidence.It has been a year of protests in education, healthcare, and farming. Social discontent related to the loss of purchasing power has continued to grow. Because unemployment has fallen to pre-2008 crisis levels and everyone has a job, but salaries don't cover the end of the month. Housing is a pipe dream, while we hear about the construction of thousands of social and affordable rental apartments by the Generalitat. To be fair, these are measures that can generate a sustained supply for all budgets, but of course, apartments are not built overnight.We are checking the effects of the enormous demographic growth that Catalonia has experienced in the last 25 years. Those of us who are of a certain age still remember the announcement of "we are 6 million", and today we have already passed 8 and some are talking about 10. The seams of the country have burst everywhere and subsumed by common regime autonomous policies, we do not have the necessary fiscal and budgetary sovereignty to make a country tailor-made for us. That state investments in Catalonia in 2025 were 8.6% is outrageous. A consequence of this panorama is the electoral boom that Catalan Alliance will experience next year in the municipal elections according to all the polls, a boom that would announce a surpassing in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia which, if not brought forward, would be in the spring of 2028. There is citizen exhaustion, a loss of confidence in the usual parties and leaderships, the ghost of existential linguistic anguish has reappeared and we have not fully recovered from the Process's Dragon Khan. If we add to this the great capacity of the far-right to turn the most primary identity drives into votes, the demographic future indicates that in Catalonia the same thing will end up happening that has already happened in other places in Europe and the world.The country has talent, it retains the knack for doing things well, it has reserves of self-esteem, and it has seen it all to be able to react to adversity. The country is more solid than it currently appears and it falters just as everyone falters. The problem is that it lacks the minimum sovereignty needed to make its own decisions. And for all of this, we go on vacation (and we are thankful for it) knowing that next season we will face the same problems and that the current solutions will fall short.Good summer and see you soon.

On the day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, patron saint of seafarers, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the CJEU, delivered a long-awaited and at the same time highly significant ruling for Catalan and Spanish politics: according to European justice, the amnesty law approved by the Spanish Parliament more than two years ago affects neither the legal order nor the economic interests of the Union. The resolution is clear and unambiguous, leaving no doubt as to the scope of its application.

The Supreme Court continues to apply the amnesty law drop by drop and after many months of waiting. The high court has now applied it to the first minister of the 1-O government: Meritxell Serret, who was convicted by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to one year of disqualification and a fine of 12,000 euros for her participation in the organization of the October 1st referendum. In 2017, Serret was Minister of Agriculture. She later became Minister of Foreign Action with the government of Pere Aragonès and, subsequently, was the Government's delegate in Brussels while in exile. She returned to Catalonia in March 2021. “This chamber has decided that the acts for which she has been accused are declared amnestied,” concludes the Supreme Court's order to which ARA has had access. In this way, the former minister is exempted from all criminal responsibilities attributed to her.

Today we have published an article that begins by saying “Brussels reminds…”.Specifically, “Brussels reminds Spanish courts that they must apply the CJEU ruling on the amnesty”. The news could continue by saying “Brussels reminds and Madrid disobeys”, or “Brussels reminds and Madrid doesn't remember”, because the disregard shown by the Court of Auditors, the National Court, or the Supreme Court towards the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the full conformity with European law of the amnesty law is nothing but disobedience. The meaning of it all is clear: President Puigdemont's return to Catalonia is an humiliation for the entire political, media, police, and judicial state apparatus, especially the judicial one, which turned the prosecution of hundreds of Catalans into a reason to live with the rojigualda flag hanging on the balcony, and a merit for advancement. And, therefore, they will prolong the punishment as much as they can, because exiles and disqualifications prevent a strategic reorganization of the independence movement, which, however much it is here and no longer leaves, has not only failed to find new forms of widely accepted expression or new leaderships, but has also revealed the worst face of disorientation and division.The Spanish obstructionist impulse, which refers, therefore, to its essences, also has a tactical component which is the countdown waiting for the fall (and who knows if prosecution) of Pedro Sánchez, which would place the mechanisms of the executive and part of the legislative in the same hands as the judicial.

Although the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has validated the amnesty, there are courts that still refuse to apply it. From ERC, the deputy general secretary of organization, finance, and anti-repression, Pau Morales (Vilassar de Dalt, 1994) explains to us what his party's roadmap is to continue pressing.

The football obsession and the brain drain that we all have at this point in a summer that is already in full climate change have made the scandalous reaction of the Spanish judicial leadership, and of the ultra-nationalist right, to the CJEU ruling on the amnesty pass unnoticed. The summary is as follows. Constitutional Court: will look at it upon returning from vacation. Supreme Court: maintains the arrest warrant for Puigdemont and the embezzlement charge, and keeps the ace up its sleeve of raising new preliminary questions, which would further delay the process by a few more months. The PP: in the words of Secretary General Miguel Tellado, the CJEU ruling does not enter "into the substance of the matter". The substance of the matter is to get rid of Pedro Sánchez and his government, so evil that, according to the PP, it doesn't even support the national team.On the part of the socialists and the partners in Sánchez's investiture, and on the part of those directly affected – the independence leaders now amnestied by the European court – caution, prudence, calculation, and tense calm have predominated. Óscar Puente, the hooligan minister, broke the violin string, who overstepped by inviting Puigdemont to “show up in Spain”. This – since we mention football – is because Puente, like so many others, has for years applied to the certainly serious events that have occurred in the last ten years in the conflict between Catalonia and Spain the clumsy, emotional, and childish logic typical of football. They truly believe that “Puigdemont fled Spain inside the trunk of a car” and, from here, they are easy prey for the narrative they themselves have been building. An uninformed and misinforming, Manichean narrative, which quickly reduces reality to its caricature level. “Is there a favorable ruling from the ECJ? Then let him show up here”. If a minister's analytical capacity is this, the flood has arrived this far.However, what is truly alarming is the attitude of the Spanish courts towards their European counterparts. The fact that a state is a member of the EU means that European law and jurisprudence are incorporated into the legal corpus in force in that state and acquire a higher rank of relevance than "national" law and jurisprudence. The rulings of the European courts are not "foreign" rulings or intolerable interferences. European rulings cannot be postponed, neglected, evaded, or ignored. On the contrary, Spanish courts must respect them, apply them, and enforce them with the same zeal and diligence as if they were "own" rulings. However, this one from the CJEU on the amnesty is particularly difficult for them. And it is understandable, because it highlights the dirty game that Spanish justice and politics (in particular, the Supreme Court and the PP) have played and continue to play, naturally to defend the unity of Spain. The CJEU does not agree with them on anything and, without saying it, says what they are: politicians who act outside of democracy, and corrupt judges.

The Constitutional Court will begin to reconsider the amnesty in two months, on September 22, because really, what are sixty days in the life of a person who has been waiting for justice, exiled or disqualified, for almost nine years? It won't matter anymore.

The Constitutional Court (TC) will hold the first debate on amnesty for the leaders of the Procés on September 22, as ARA has learned. It will be within the framework of the amparo appeal filed by the former minister and now general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, whose rapporteur is magistrate José María Macías. With this first discussion, the Constitutional Court will begin deliberations that both the Spanish government and the independence movement hope will end with resolutions favorable to the amnesty for former president Carles Puigdemont; ERC leader Oriol Junqueras, and the rest of the convicted or processed former ministers. In fact, this is the step that was already foreseen for the autumn, after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) concluded that the expenses related to the 1-O "do not affect the financial interests of the European Union. This week there was also a plenary session of the Constitutional Court, but they considered that they did not have enough time to address the issue before the holidays.

Backed by European justice, the amnesty has begun this week on the final stretch for all independence movement victims to leave judicial proceedings behind. To start, in the coming weeks, the twelve CDR members accused of terrorism and the thirty-five political leaders for whom the Prosecutor's Office is seeking 3 million euros from the Court of Auditors, should be the first to benefit from the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). But at the pinnacle of the State's legal hierarchy, the Supreme Court is resisting accepting that the leaders of the Procés are exonerated from any responsibility, some without even having appeared before it.

The ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) supporting the Spanish amnesty law is a supremely important step towards achieving that this norm can finally be applied without exclusions or restrictions one day. But for now, it is not enough to stop the long chess game that has been played in political and judicial spheres since 2017 – and before – around this issue. It is evident that the reason of state remains present in the attitude maintained by institutions, organizations, and bodies of all kinds, along with the power core of the conservative magistracy, well established at the top of the state's organizational chart. To realize this, one does not need to be a radical independentist. It is enough to have followed the events of recent years with some interest.

I also think, like Minister Puente, that Carles Puigdemont should pack his bags and show up in Barcelona, and get himself arrested if necessary, to demonstrate that Spanish justice is a political entity at the service of Spanish nationalism, and that it is indifferent to contradicting the CJEU, as it has already corrected itself regarding the popular sovereignty represented in Parliament. But I will not do it, because even though I am convinced that such a gesture would be good for the country, and bad for Spain's international reputation, I do not see myself able to ask for sacrifices from a person who has been forced to live away from her homeland for nine years.In addition to Puigdemont and other leaders, there are dozens of political officials and high-ranking civil servants whose futures are still compromised, as they are awaiting, two years later, the application of the amnesty that the pro-independence parties managed to impose on the PSOE in exchange for Pedro Sánchez's investiture. Two years of false reconciliation, of a forced reunion that is based on blackmail. This deceitful normality has gripped the freedom of action of two parties that paid dearly for the hesitations of 2017 and that have failed in all attempts to regain the initiative. Each has failed in its own way, with its own mirages; Junts, with the mystical trap of Waterloo, and ERC, with the prosaic trap of partial agreements that reality, shaped in Madrid, renders inapplicable. And in addition, there is the joint failure of rivalry and disunity, which has caused the option of presenting a weak PSOE with a genuine tug-of-war that would allow us to say that the Procés was not entirely in vain to fade away.The ruling of the CJEU is a reputational defeat for Spain and its judges, but for Catalonia it is only a tactical victory with limited impact. In short, everyone loses, but at least we can say that we are closer to closing one chapter – not that of the Process, but that of false reconciliation – and opening another: that of the new country project, presented without baggage, with new ideas and faces. Everything is more difficult than two decades ago, but those of us who were there are still here (in the background, but we are here), and the problems and threats that made us take to the streets, unfortunately, continue to lurk, even more serious and painful. A new generation must draw the future, without humiliating those who did not succeed, but without allowing themselves to be constrained by their legacy.Meanwhile, with Catalanism banned from the streets, football-mad Spain has gone on the offensive, because it knows what's at stake, because it has no other burning key to sustain its identity, and because in our country there are enough fools to swallow the World Cup placebo and forget about the fundamental question, which is who this monstrous state marketing operation truly benefits, who it is saving the furniture for, just as the 1978 championship saved the backside of dictator Videla.I hope, since we are talking about it, that after the suffocating experience of this Football World Cup, it will not be necessary to insist again to our politicians on the fact that the symbolic battle for Catalonia is as important as the battle for sovereignty or for taxes. It is demonstrated that symbolic capital, in plural entities, can be divided just as competences and resources are divided. The fact that Spain reserves its exclusivity, to make it a tool for unification and indoctrination through mass sport, denies the plurality of the State and is a luxury we cannot afford. That Catalonia and Euskadi participate in European-level championships would be a first step to correct this operation, so well crafted, of national assimilation through the leisure (or opium) of the people.

The endorsement of the amnesty law by the Court of Justice of the European Union will test Spanish institutions and could expose the politicization of justice at the highest levels, which has long been sending worrying signals with the government majority in its sights. The president of the court, Belgian judge Koens Lennaert, highlights the purpose of "reducing institutional and political tensions, as well as facilitating a scenario of reconciliation." Do those who must ratify the law's application share this idea? From the judicial world, there has been an immediate move to distance themselves. For now, various judicial spokespersons have wanted to make three principles very clear: that the CJEU can have whatever opinion it wants, but that regarding the amnesty, it is the Spanish judges who must decide; that to interpret the Constitution we already have the Constitutional Court and there is no need for it to be done from abroad, and that there can be no automatic application of the amnesty. That is to say, calm and patience.

Gonzalo Boye (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1965) is one of the leading lawyers of the "Procés", the main person responsible for the legal strategy of the exile, and one of the architects of the amnesty law that has just been validated by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

After the European justice's approval of the amnesty, a couple of immediate questions remain, the first: who remains to be amnestied?Here we explain it: the CDRs (indicted in the National Court for terrorism) and those pending before the Court of Auditors, accused by the Prosecutor's Office and by Societat Civil Catalana, which is claiming five million from them, but then there is a small trickle of cases distributed in various parts of the country. And the other: when can Puigdemont return? Núria Orriols, our delegate in Madrid, reviews all possible scenarios, which include the fact that the Supreme Court has no deadline to rush its decision and could even ask Europe again if embezzlement is amnestible, even though the Constitutional Court had already said that the amnesty was constitutional. The only certainty is that the Constitutional Court will rule in the autumn precisely on whether embezzlement is amnestible. And this is where the political calendar comes in: in Madrid, it is rumored that it will be in the autumn when Pedro Sánchez can announce the call for elections. If Puigdemont arrives before or during the campaign, the consequences are diverse: it helps Junts, it campaigns for PP and VOX against the PSOE in Spain and it helps the PSC in Catalonia. Yesterday Aznar said that "the seditious aggression" could not go unpunished. And it is that in the amnesty two grievances converge according to PP, the patriotic grievance (Spain is not voted for) and that of power, and here is where the two public enemies number one are found: Puigdemont and Sánchez. They want them both in prison. The PSOE governs having lost, thanks to the amnesty agreed with Junts. Aznar, incidentally, recalled that the unity of Spain is basic for the European Union, as is that of Italy or Germany or any other country. Aznar and a good part of Spanish politics put unity first and then democracy, with the mental reservation that without unity there is no democracy. From this tangle between aggravated flag and the power they do not have, there is the reason for the refusal of the Spanish judicial leadership to apply a law that has been approved for more than two years, which is Constitutional and in accordance with Community legislation. Remember the 2006 Statute. We've been the same for 20 years. And the problem is that in these 20 years the country has changed a lot, the world has changed a lot, needs have multiplied and we don't have all the tools. And the parties in Catalonia are too divided to overcome the enormity of the challenge that the future of the country represents. A certain unity of action is a necessary condition.Good morning.

The day after the European justice's endorsement of the amnesty everyone builds their own narrative. While the independence movement celebrates the ECJ's decision, but warns that this does not end the repression, both the Catalan and Spanish governments see their "reconciliation" agenda validated and claim the end of the "political crisis" between Catalonia and the State. Moreover, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, has assured that if he "were Carles Puigdemont" he would return to Spain, "without a doubt". "We must face up to it once and for all," he said in an interview with RNE, as reported by Efe. This attitude has not pleased Junts at all, as the arrest warrant remains in effect and the former president would be arrested. "What misery and frivolity," replied the party's general secretary, Jordi Turull. After this, party sources consulted by ARA reaffirm their break with the Spanish government, also after the ECJ's ruling in favor of amnesty.

The Spanish legislature will end more or less as it began: debating the amnesty law. But while Pedro Sánchez has long since assumed the political costs, it seems the judiciary still has outstanding bills and it is not clear whether it will want to collect them or file them away. Indeed, the law of criminal oblivion, emphatically validated on Thursday by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has faced the hostility of the political and media right from the start, but above all from the judicial right, wounded in its self-esteem (and in its patriotism) by what is seen, even before Parliament, the only body with direct democratic legitimacy, decided to annul the severe penalties imposed by a handful of modern Torquemadas on the instigators of the Procés. Undoubtedly, the law has experienced many political obstacles, such as the mines laid in the Senate by the PP majority, the request for dispensable consultative reports, or the intervention of the Venice Commission. But it has also had to overcome the raising of prejudicial questions before the Constitutional Court (TC) — at the request of the second chamber of the Supreme Court of Marchena and Llarena — and before the CJEU — in this case, by the National Court, which is trying the CDRs for terrorism (!), and by the Court of Auditors, which is settling the accounting responsibility for the 9-N of dozens of high-ranking officials —, under the pretext that there were doubts about the law's fit within the Constitution or European law.First, it was the Constitutional Court that reaffirmed the full constitutionality of the law in about twenty rulings derived from appeals from all the autonomous communities governed by the PP and even from the ineffable García-Page. And now it is the CJEU that has ruled in two judgments on the unequivocal adequacy of the amnesty to EU law, recognizing that it has served to reduce tension and that it has acted as a "tool for normalization", as the preamble of the norm mentioned. This fundamental argument reaffirms what the court's advocate general, Dean Spielmann, expressed at the time, who dismissed it as an "auto-amnesty" arising from a political trick. Furthermore, the Court of Luxembourg does not object to accounting responsibility demanded by the Court of Auditors being amnestied, because, as is logical, an ephemeral "disconnection" of Catalonia could not affect the financial interests of the EU, and declares that the law complies with the standards of the European Court of Human Rights by expressly excluding serious crimes and the violation of fundamental rights from its benefits. Game over.

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is a stark reminder that the trial of the Procés was a charade where everything was seen: false testimonies, which everyone knew were false, were given with impunity; prosecutors were seen reciting from memory what the police officers summoned to testify were supposed to say; defense witnesses were questioned by the court; defense evidence could not be presented to support the veracity of the defendants' statements; for the first time, private prosecution was brought by a far-right party; civil rights and human rights organizations suffered all sorts of obstacles in carrying out their supervisory task, and a very long etcétera of irregularities that resulted in a judgment confirming Spain as a country with political prisoners and exiles. Justice was not sought, but revenge for a mobilization (the ballot boxes of October 1st) that exposed the democratic shortcomings of a state that, faced with legitimate dissent, only knew how to resort to repression.The ruling, without explicitly saying so, encompasses all of this. And more: Spain lost its full democracy status in the index of The Economist, and became a flawed democracy, precisely because of the response it gave to Catalan independence, a brutal response in all aspects: police and judicial, but also institutional and political (King Felipe VI's speech on October 3rd, the application – invented on the fly – of Article 155). It became clear that Spain has a serious internal problem: years later it regained the label of full democracy, but the development of events has shown that it is a term that is too big for a state where the police fabricate false evidence against the enemies of the ultranationalist right, where citizens are spied on with programs like Pegasus (recently we have learned about the cases of David Fernàndez and Carles Riera), where a rapper has been in prison for more than five years for a satirical song, where the gag law is never repealed, or where just yesterday two activists in Mallorca who had painted slogans against tourist saturation were arrested and accused by the Civil Guard of belonging to a criminal gang.Or a state, also, in which justice not only acts in part, but refuses to apply a current law such as the amnesty law, now also reinforced by the CJEU ruling. Predictably, now the Constitutional Court will rule in favor of the appeals for protection filed by exiled pro-independence leaders convicted of embezzlement for the organization of the October 1st referendum, and the Supreme Court will try to torpedo it, because the high Spanish judiciary does not even try to conceal the political affiliations of judges and prosecutors. The CJEU magistrates are obviously also aware of the political content of their ruling. They, however, have no interest in favoring some political parties over others: rather, they say that what is at stake in Spain is democracy itself, and the rule of law.

As expected, the CJEU has validated the amnesty for Catalan political representatives, who were accused of terrorism (for pots with sulfate for plants or because it was in “the atmosphere”) and embezzlement (because during the referendum they used school electricity and toilet paper). The reaction of politicians has been very different, depending on their affiliation. The Catalan PP brought out Lorena Roldán and hid the portraits from above. Junts brought out Gonzalo Boye and Turull, not Puigdemont. Illa, from the Palau, made an institutional declaration in Catalan, Spanish, and English. Esquerra brought out Junqueras, who said he was looking forward to hugging Puigdemont either in Girona or Barcelona. On the other hand, Rufián, on X, said, after celebrating it, that “the PP and Junts speak, agree, and vote as never before”.

The judge of the ECJ who has given voice to the endorsement of European justice for the amnesty has mentioned the purpose of reconciliation that drove it. It sounded promising, hopeful, desirable. But the judiciary has already sent enough signals that, in the case of the Procés, reconciliation rhymes with prison. European justice has pointed out to Spanish justice that there is no other way than amnesty and, on the other hand, we will see when Carles Puigdemont returns or Oriol Junqueras is qualified. The contrast is so shameless that a Spanish socialist minister has even stated that “it would not be too much for democracy, which crossed the Pyrenees a long time ago, to reach all the institutions of the State”. Of course, the Minister of Rodalies speaks from the wound of the accusations against Pedro Sánchez’s family, not from those of the Procés, and he is only an ally of the cause of the most elementary sense of justice out of pure political survival necessity. It is nothing new: they tried the political prisoners for rebellion, they were convicted of sedition, and more than two years have passed without applying amnesty for a delirious crime of embezzlement and terrorism for the CDRs. There will be little reconciliation here.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has ended up saying what, in reality, we already knew. Not because the answer was predictable or desired from a political perspective, but because any minimally rigorous reading of Union law made it very difficult to argue that the amnesty law violated the European principles that some invoked with a conviction that was more ideological than legal. The question is not, therefore, what Luxembourg has said, but why some Spanish courts decided to ask it what they already knew it would answer.When the Court of Auditors and the National Court raised their preliminary questions, they were not faced with a genuine interpretative doubt, because there was no legal uncertainty of sufficient magnitude to justify transferring the decision to the ECJ. There was, above all, a desire to gain time. To delay the effectiveness of a law approved by the democratic legislator and to keep alive a confrontation that had ceased to be legal for years and had essentially become political.This is, probably, one of the great institutional anomalies of the last decade. The government of Mariano Rajoy decided to subcontract to the courts the response to an essentially political issue. In any mature rule of law, judges guarantee the rules of the game, but they do not replace those who have the democratic legitimacy to resolve political conflicts.