It is difficult to find an adjective that does not irredeemably denounce former Spanish prime minister Felipe González for his reaction to Pedro Sánchez's first forays over pardons for the Catalan political prisoners. His first moves, after having the folder in one of his drawers of his desk at the Moncloa palace for more than a year. It is simply sickening that the leader who was capable of practicing state terrorism with the GAL death squads, and who signed a pardon for former general Alfonso Armada, one of the main architects of the attempted coup d'état of February 23rd, 1981, is radically opposed to granting clemency to the members of the Catalan government, the speaker of parliament, the president of Òmnium and the president of the ANC.
The also-opposed position of the Supreme Court, delivered with a clear message to Pedro Sánchez about the red line that he would be crossing, has a first effect of requiring the pardon to be only partial and not total. It is possible, therefore, that the sentence of disqualification from holding public office will be maintained even if the pardon ends up being granted. The Spanish right has already declared its radical opposition: the PP, Vox and Ciudadanos will act with more unity than ever. And the Socialist regional barons are beginning to make their voices heard, several of them showing their discrepancies, such as Castile-La Mancha president García-Page, and Extremadura's Fernández Vara - as always, leading the hard-liners.
The ultra machinery has already started to chug into motion and in a few days it will go from a commitment aimed at stopping a full pardon to a much more complex situation, full of conditioning factors along the way. Furthermore, with the foreseeable boomerang effect that the Supreme Court's third chamber will find a way for the prisoners to re-enter prison. It is, unfortunately, a matter of time.
The Spanish political and media dynamic is well-oiled, to start off holding up a very, very large carrot, which, at the definitive moment, turns into an optical illusion; in reality, it turns out that the vegetable patch itself was much smaller. The swindle over Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy in the 2000s, in part, ended up like this, and in each seismic movement by the Spanish deep state, several competencies were stripped off along the way. The 2010 Constitutional Court ruling on the Statute was a fully-fledged assault on what had already been a political agreement of minimums. The Supreme Court's ruling on the October 1st referendum has had this component of the Spanish state's desire to teach a lesson to the Catalan independence movement and its nine political prisoners. And what the Supreme Court is telling them is that it does not accept having its ruling corrected by any government.