I must admit that it is a spectacle worthy of the great Berlanga to see Carlos Lesmes, the president of Spain's General Council of the Judiciary and also of its Supreme Court, with his mandate having expired more than a thousand days ago, in the presence of king Felipe VI, ceremonially opening the judicial year with criticism of prime minister Pedro Sánchez for the partial pardons granted to the Catalan prisoners, while maintaining a resounding silence on all the corruption surrounding the current monarch’s father.
It must be that this is precisely what the "deep state" is for: to decry what the political powers elected by the citizens do under their legitimate competencies - the ability to grant a pardon is a power in the hands of the executive - and to walk on tiptoe, without making a sound, through the corruption of the former head of state, now a luxury exile in the United Arab Emirates, and whom the Supreme Court prosecutor has labelled as nothing more nor less than an international commission agent.
Only in Spain does an institution that forms part of the spinal column of any state allow itself, in the current situation, to do these two things at the same time: that its top officials remain in their positions for an indefinite period and with an expired mandate and, at the same time, they express out loud a position that coincidentally is the same as that of the politicians who support them in their Numantine resistance. At the point we have now reached, for the General Council of the Judiciary to defend the independence of the judges must be its obligation, but, unfortunately, it will find very few allies in its defence and even fewer in Catalonia.
The events during these recent years have gone in the opposite direction to what Lesmes asserts and the Supreme Court has not defended democracy: in fact, it has acted against those who defended it. It will be years before the rulings from European justice arrive so that it can be established with full clarity that the Spanish senior judiciary has violated freedoms and fundamental rights and has taken part in the persecution of democratic ideologies, something unparalleled in the Europe which Spain once wanted - so it said - to resemble. Today, there is nothing left of that goal.
The deep state took control of the state before it fell apart territorially. And there its forces continue, entrenched, above good and evil and trying to reinterpret the Constitution with a shine more typical of the laws of a bygone age. But it should be given a prize for categorizing the Catalan independence movement as the only ideological group to be persecuted, while on the other hand it protects the king emeritus from all the swindles we now know he has carried out.
With the father having fled and in parts unknown, and the son waiting to see whether or not a prosecutor decides to go hard against his predecessor, Spain behaves as if nothing happened and much more dirt could be hidden under the carpet. Meanwhile, in the distance, Lesmes talks about revenge. Not that of the judges. And, with his term having expired almost three years ago, no one dares to ensure that he will not be there again next year, presiding over a new inauguration of the judicial year.