The big winner of yesterday's rally against pardons in the Plaza Colon in Madrid was the regional president, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, who is increasingly becoming the spearhead of the unapologetic and illiberal right wing that Vox supposedly stands for but in the capital is represents by her better than anyone. So much so that yesterday Ayuso made another misstep and involved King Felipe VI in the question of pardons. "What will the king do, will he sign these pardons?" she asked rhetorically. Perhaps unwittingly Ayuso was crossing a red line and putting the monarchy in an awkward position, since she was somehow calling for the king to breach the role assigned to him by the Constitution, which is none other than to sign what the council of ministers decides.

The PSOE-United Podemos government's defence of pardons has awakened the anti-Catalanist impulse always latent in the Spanish right wing, now, if possible, even more prone to it due to the weight of the far right. The PP has brought back the collection of signatures - emulating what Mariano Rajoy did in 2006 to fight the Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy - and the PP itself, as well as Inés Arrimadas's Ciudadanos, have been dragged into the demonstration called in Madrid for Sunday 13 June, in Plaza Colón, by a civic platform led by Rosa Díez, Fernando Savater and María San Gil. Naturally, Vox signed up enthusiastically to the appointment from the first moment, uniting once again the three parties from the symbolic photo in Colón in February 2019, when Casado already led a demonstration with Abascal and Rivera. Although Casado wanted to limit the response to the pardons to the institutional sphere, in the end the main right-wing party will endorse mobilisation in the street. The tension is served. Putting President Pedro Sánchez and independentism in the same bag is big game for this incendiary right wing, incapable of accepting the plurinationality of the State. It is the usual double front to save Spain from the red danger and the Catalan danger, a classic of contemporary history that returns at the slightest opportunity. Moreover, the PP can count, as we are already seeing, on the complicity of the most Jacobin and nationalist soul of the PSOE.