1. Every February 23rd, we remember that the trio of Tejero, Armada, and Milans del Bosch attempted a military coup in Spain. The assault on Congress lasted less than 24 hours and brought an end to the "cowards." But the army and the Civil Guard had tried to reverse, through the intimidation of arms, the nascent democracy that was beginning to emerge in Spain. From 1981 to 2026, we've seen it all, but 45 years later, the uniforms, the medals, and the peaked caps still think they are above good and evil. It's not enough for them to flaunt their pathological supremacism with an offensive self-importance. Like the stars they wear on their lapels, they display a moral superiority anchored in outdated values ​​from another century, or from another regime they seem to yearn for. Do high-ranking police officers in Spain believe they are untouchable because they have turned the old question of who watches the watchmen into mere rhetoric?

Operation Catalonia is the "illicit" origin of the case against the Pujol family. This is the argument being presented by the defense lawyers for the former president's family in the trial at the National Court. The court, in fact, has accepted that the leadership of the "patriotic police" must testify as a witness in the trialAnd this Thursday, new evidence of his role in the case against the Pujol family was published. It is an audio recording from 2017. disseminated by Eldiario.esIn a recording, former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo confirms that Victoria Álvarez, former partner of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola and a key figure in the origin of the case against the family, was paid by the National Police. He states this in a conversation with former PP Secretary General María Dolores de Cospedal. According to the aforementioned media outlet, the conversation took place on September 12, 2017, shortly before the October 1 referendum, at the PP headquarters on Génova Street. "If they find out that Vicky is being paid by the Police, we're in trouble, don't you think?" Villarejo says at one point in the recording. "Well, yes," Cospedal replies, in further evidence implicating the PP leader in Operation Catalonia. The recording, according to the same report, has been in the hands of the National Court judges investigating the Kitchen case for two years, who have allegedly ignored it.

Leire Diez, investigated in a Madrid court for bribery and influence peddling, has been the PP's choice to resume, after the summer recess, the crusade in the Senate against the PSOE for its alleged corruption cases. The former Socialist militant appeared before the commission of inquiry into the Koldo case and, despite his legal status, did not remain silent and refuted the accusations from the right and the far right, insisting on the narrative he has deployed since the scandal broke. "I'm not a plumber, I'm a journalist," he asserted, reiterating that he is working on the publication of a book on "the malfunctioning of institutions," hence the collection of audio recordings that have been released in which he allegedly interferes in judicial proceedings. Díez claimed that the investigation he has conducted is not to favor the PSOE but in favor of the "rule of law," and denied that he was "well connected" within the party, thus distancing himself from both the PSOE and former party leader Santos Cerdán.

Listening to the audio recordings of Santos Cerdán, José Luis Ábalos, and Koldo García forces us to smell again the old, familiar odor (we quote Benet and Jornet) of political corruption. If at any point we had wanted to believe that we had reached the minimum level of maturity that means avoiding the tricks of the smart ones in power, if we had ever thought that we were at least beginning to leave behind the infantilizing phase of exercising power, listening again to the conversations of those who thieves of public money brings us back to reality. It is objectively unpleasant to have to live surrounded by a political class that cannot, or does not want to, rid itself of corruption understood as a systemic element (another legacy of Francoism that, in turn, the dictatorship inherited from traditions of power rooted at least since the Bourbon Restoration).

That Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE (and, therefore, the Spanish coalition government) have a problem is, at this point, beyond doubt. The nature and scope of that problem is another matter. To put it mildly, the fact that someone like Ábalos could be involved in a plot torrentian (from Torrente, of course) wasn't a fact that could surprise anyone, and perhaps that had to do with the fact that the PSOE itself suspended him from office and membership as soon as accusations against him surfaced. That someone like Santos Cerdán (such an executive, such a negotiator, so trustworthy) could be/is in power is something new. In any case, the PSOE is what's called a systemic party, and that, in Spain (and in Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands) means entering into this dynamic of opaque financing, favors owed, and personal ambitions that, to put it briefly, we call corruption.

José Manuel Villarejo says he has had and has homosexual friends, responding to a question from People's Party MP Luis Santamaría about Pedro Sánchez's father-in-law's alleged prostitution business. At this point in Parliament's committee on the Kitchen corruption case, no one knew that the headline the former police superintendent will provide the media will be related to Juan Carlos I and sex. Vox MP Macarena Olona, however, sees it coming: "I will not ask questions as interesting as the PP spokesman has, or else we will end up talking about sex".