Arithmetic and politics do not always go hand in hand and what happened this Tuesday in the European Parliament with the vote on lifting the immunity as MEPs of the exiled Catalan leaders Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí sends two very clear messages: first, the result of the vote, which is clearly a pyrrhic victory for the Spanish theses. In the club of states, the rules are clear and appeals against them are never won, as corrections are not accepted but rather are subjected to public ridicule. There was no real possibility that the request to lift the immunity would not prosper, as politics and justice in this case lead in different directions. Spain manoeuvred with a disproportionate governmental intensity; the four ideological families in favour of granting the request - the progressives (PSOE), the mainstream right (PP), the liberals (Cs) and the conservatives (Vox) - activated a dominating campaign to pressure their respective parliamentary groups, while the strength of pro-independence support in Europe is what it is.
Despite this reality, Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí have left Spain on the brink of the abyss. At its very limit and with the embarrassment of only convincing 57% of MEPs to align themselves with the request from the Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena. If we leave the Spanish MEPs out of the final result and look only at what parliamentarians in the rest of the EU opted for, the percentage is reduced to 55%. These are the numbers: enough for the Spanish victory, but the Catalan cause, in favour of independence, against the repression and denouncing Spanish justice's failure to be impartial, has shown an unimaginable strength and solidarity for which Catalonia must be grateful from the 293 MEPs who did not vote in favour - a balance in which only four are Catalan. It is a point which was unimaginable before the vote and shows that the internationalization of the Catalan cause has reached the heart of Europe and has come to stay. Four hundred MEPs did vote in favour, including 46 Spaniards from the parties of the regime, as a single bloc, although they have been unable to avoid desertion among their ranks in other countries.
I know that, from the moment the result of the vote appeared, the inconsistent Spanish media and political spheres have been quick to situate Puigdemont, Comín and Ponsatí as just a step away from being handed over to Spanish justice, while also masking the discredit of Spain in the affair. But there will be no handover of the three MEPs to the Spanish judiciary, either now or in the future. All that has happened is a single political vote with no legal consequences. Judge Llarena knows this, and, aware that he has the battle in Brussels lost, is trying to delay the result by raising preliminary questions in the EU courts in Luxembourg that will stop the clock on his defeat in Belgium.
The fact that minutes after the decision of the European Parliament, it was decided to suspend the open prison regime of seven of the the jailed pro-independence leaders and return them immediately to Lledoners prison cannot be a coincidence. Just perhaps, someone thought that in the midst of a vote in the European Parliament, or a few days before it, this move would have had negative consequences for Spanish interests. Montesquieu is dead, as Spain's powerful former deputy PM Alfonso Guerra said back in 1985, when, taking advantage of the overwhelming Socialist majority, he proceeded to modify the nominations to the judiciary. And, certainly, he was right, even if on Tuesday the Socialist minister Miquel Iceta asserted that a separation of powers exists in Spain and denied that the executive was playing any role in the European Parliament request or the changes in the prisoners' leave regime.
We've had enough of this farce, please. Let’s all be a little more serious. The repressors and the repressed.