We have just heard former Spanish prime minister Felipe González stating, with that false authority conferred only by his leadership of the Spanish government over a period of almost fifteen years and thus having already passed beyond the level of even minimal prudence and discretion, that sometimes Pedro Sánchez's executive is very similar to the famous cabin in the Marx Brothers' movie. The analogy is even amusing, as the PSOE pulls its way and Podemos pulls the other way as the cabinet gets stuck again and again in arguments that are often Byzantine. In that film, A Night at the Opera, the Marx Brothers were deliriously ironic about how many people it was possible to fit into the cabin of a passenger ship. But beyond the humour of seeing Felipe talking badly about his own political family, something that he does not find very difficult to do, the example is not entirely accurate because, in the cabin imagined by the Marx Brothers in 1934 at a time when they were going through a bad patch, there are not only members of the Spanish government, but as well, not a day goes by without there being opponents who are ready to obtain a place between those cramped four walls where the most unreasonable and surreal incidents can end up happening.
González is imprudent, but he knows the limits of his criticism: don't worry, it's only about politicians. One will never hear him stepping into the swampy terrain of the deep state, as he is the first to know that he could only come out worse off. He could have easily spoken out to criticise the challenge of the Civil Guard against the interior minister; or have supported Sánchez in his denunciation of the patriotic police, or have shaken his head in public because the most conservative sector of the Supreme Court wants to find a formula to eliminate the pro-independence deputies from the Congress of Deputies for not having correctly sworn to abide by the Constitution; and he could have expressed his perplexity that the Supreme Court, through a whatsapp message, has announced that, predictably, the hearing for the disqualification of Catalan president Torra will begin on September 17th even though it is not yet known who the reporting judge will be nor whether the proposed calendar will be sufficient for the work he or she has to do. This without anyone explaining what is to happen to the cases that were ahead of this one in the wait for a hearing by the Supreme Court, whether they will be resolved by then or not, or whether the nervousness to disqualifying president Torra has led to queue jumping. Not to mention how the Supreme Court ignores European justice and insists that Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín cannot be MEPs, without it mattering at all to the court that the pair are already MEPs and that its ruling has no value, except for what it can lead to in domestic consumption and propaganda.
It is very striking that the Constitutional Court is studying a complaint from the Vox party to leave 29 parliamentarians without seats, several of them pro-independence and some deputies from Podemos, based on the way that they made their required promise in the act of accepting their positions, when the EU Court of Justice has already established that what counts is that you were elected as a deputy. In a serious country, this news from the Constitutional Court would have either never occurred or, if it had, no one would even be aware of it as it makes no sense. But we have seen so many things, so many barbarities, that at first seemed quite implausible that it is not excessively cautious to avoid taking it all as a joke. The Spanish government has long since ceased to have a significant share of power and in this spider's web of countless court cases hovering over politicians anything could end up happening. Even the impossible? Even that.