Exhibiting the arrogance and contempt that usually characterizes Spanish governments, the minister for the prime minister's department, Félix Bolaños, held an unsuccessful meeting this Sunday in Barcelona with his Catalan counterpart, minister for the presidency Laura Vilagrà, with the sole intention of mixing water into the wine of the CatalanGate political scandal. Bolaños appeared with that attitude which Jordi Pujol defined so well in an electoral meeting in 2002, explaining the typical behaviour of successive Spanish governments with the Catalan nationalists. “They're like my grandmother when she used to go out to the chicken coop and call the hens, saying ‘here chick, chick, chick,’” he explained, to applause from the audience.
Pedro Sánchez's envoy was unable to return to Madrid with good news, because the Socialists hold very bad cards in this murky affair and their proposal is a poor joke. I noted last Friday that the Spanish government was trying to find a formula to reduce the price that the PSOE has to pay for the most serious political espionage scandal to have come to light in Europe. And indeed that is what they have tried: firstly, making use of the Defensor del Pueblo, the Spanish ombudsman - the Socialist and former Spanish minister Ángel Gabilondo - to open an investigation is to decaffeinate the problem and delay its solution; as well, hastily convening the official secrets committee of the Congress of Deputies - which has not met for years - is to park CatalanGate out of sight and have a laugh at those affected; and finally, announcing an internal inquiry within the CNI spy agency is ineffective and worrying, because it is to accept that the secret services may have people working on their own account.
Everything would be much simpler if the PSOE wanted to take CatalanGate seriously, because there is no doubt that the Pegasus software has been used by the state's services, whichever ones in particular they may be, because only the government can buy the program from the Israeli firm. We therefore come back to the same old questions. Did the Spanish state buy the Pegasus software? With what money? What illegal and fraudulent use has been made of it? What screening has it passed through - if any, and here it is necessary to look at the judiciary - in order to carry out this espionage?
None of these issues enters into the content that the parliamentary committee on official secrets is able to find out at a meeting, because it is not a secret case. You don't set up a massive case of espionage, with international repercussions like this one, in order to report it later to members of the Spanish Congress. That are taking us for idiots if they think we'll buy that. These things, as we learned very well with the GAL death squads, are put together by the state so that explanations are never required, even if the evidence is more than obvious, as it really was. Another question altogether is whether - for whatever reason - some or all of the parties affected, want one of the most serious attacks made on a democracy, mass espionage carried out by those in power, to go unpunished.
The dialogue table between the governments of Spain and Catalonia represented, in a way, the political rehabilitation of Pedro Sánchez after the events of October 1st, 2017. After the repression of that period and the prevarication of Mariano Rajoy, Sánchez offered something that the international community could easily buy: even if it was an unproductive dialogue, it was dialogue nevertheless. In the face of this change of approach, the independence movement did not hold good cards: if it didn't sit down at the table, it would look intransigent; if it did, the path would not lead anywhere. Now the cards held are better, because they have been spied on by the Spanish state and now have a new opportunity to play their hand correctly.
The flag of false dialogue was what rehabilitated Sánchez in many chancelleries and international media in the face of Rajoy's intransigence. A way to deactivate the independence movement. Now, with different cards to play, the Spanish government is left without options in a matter that it cannot hide and that it does not know how to solve politically, because it has no trumps in its hand. In addition, there are precedents for similar cases with important decisions and resignations, at least at ministerial level. That is why Sánchez is gasping for air and the independence movement has some winners up its sleeve.