This Sunday it's one week since Carles Puigdemont was taken into custody in the north of Germany while he was returning from Helsinki having been invited by a number of Finnish MPs. Puigdemont's detention, once over the initial bafflement (as no one put him as returning by car to Brussels) has once again put the arbitrariness of the detentions, the existence of political prisoners, the regime of freedoms in Spain and the violation of fundamental rights at the centre of the political and media debate in various countries (from Germany to the United Kingdom and from Portugal to Belgium, to give four).
Whilst last Sunday the dominant impression was that Puigdemont's extradition to Spain by German authorities was just a matter of time, the passing of days has moderated this opinion and now nobody dares make an emphatic prediction. What's more, day by day, German public opinion is becoming more aware of the way in which the fundamental rights of the president, the members of the Catalan government and the imprisoned leaders of the pro-independence entities have been violated.
The image of Spain, which even the country's own authorities don't seem to worry about, is being submitted to a bath of realism internationally from which it will be difficult to escape whatever the result from German justice. The most important thing is that, currently, the debate that's been brought up isn't whether Catalonia should be independent or not, but about the quality of Spanish democracy and the reappearance of worrying symptoms linked to the far right and which were believed to have vanished forever. The fire at Ateneu de Sarrià and the graffiti with Nazi and fascist symbols are the latest examples.
You just have to turn on any international TV channel to see the damage being caused. Losses of freedoms which just as soon affect a writer as Twitter users, singers, journalists, fire fighters, prison civil servants and a long etc. And sheltered in all this repressive logic, media cavemen making lists and more lists of those of us who don't think like them.