Spain's Regime of '78, as we have it known since that year, has entered into an irreversible crisis in the last decade. The monarchy, Catalonia, political parties, the state's dirty tricks, the media, the justice system at its different levels, from the Constitutional Court to the Supreme Court passing through the public prosecution service, the business elites... A range of instances can be quoted. Does this mean that the regime is dead? The answer can only be no. It is agonizing but refuses to disappear and uses its tentacles to defy the passage of time.
We've seen it in the Barcelona city council, where we have now found out the real objective of the candidature of Manuel Valls. A representative of the business sector explained it like this at the weekend: "We were battered by the loss of the Chamber of Commerce a few weeks ago and we've prevented the independence movement from taking control of both sides of Plaça Sant Jaume*. The fear that the dominoes would fall one after the other has disappeared".
Ada Colau and Manuel Valls propping up the regime that the former supposedly came to fight, that's a good one. A worse fate has befallen Colau's left-wing companions in Podemos, since where the independence movement does not exist, they are the only enemy to beat. When the moment comes, Colau will send them a fraternal embrace. What a disaster it all is!
This Monday, on the pages of El País, the paper's founder editor Juan Luis Cebrián called for a "national pact" between the Socialists and Ciudadanos so that the next Spanish government does not depend on Podemos and the pro-independence parties. Under the title "How to defend yourself from a coup d'état", he spoke of the appearance of a state in danger and focused on the soundness of Valls's action. This, on the same day as former Socialist politician Diego López Garrido, who presented the crime of rebellion to Congress when he introduced the 1995 Criminal Code, proclaimed that in the Catalan independence trial "a crime of rebellion could not be proved because none took place" since the fundamental element was missing: violence.
But the public prosecutor, Cebrián and others speak of a coup d'état in order to give their support to long prison sentences in the case. Nothing new, the lie as an emblem of the current time. The old time.
*Translator's note: Barcelona's Plaça Sant Jaume contains, on one side, the Barcelona city hall, and on the other, the Palau de la Generalitat, seat of the Catalan government.