If there doesn't crop up some sudden change to the script, Mariano Rajoy and the Partido Popular will be kicked out of power in the coming hours with the success of Pedro Sánchez's motion of no-confidence. Although a majority of 180 deputies will have made it arithmetically possible, the Catalan independence movement and Basque nationalists will have been key in the decision to expel from the Moncloa government palace a politician who came to power in 2011 convinced that Madrid wasn't Spain and who has ended up turning Spain into a large Madrid. In Berlin and in Estremera prison, they can make the old refrain that revenge is a dish best served cold their own. The government which evicted the Catalan independence movement from power through dark arts, the government which has done politics through the state's cesspit, the government which has used the justice system to imprison its political opponents, the government which threw the state's security forces against the Catalan public on 1st October last year, the government which has not accepted the election results of 21st December last year, is about to be kicked out of power. It's a matter of hours.
The motion of no-confidence presented by Pedro Sánchez had a single incentive for the Catalan independence movement: to proceed to the dismissal of Rajoy and the PP. It's not certain that the alternative will be better, nor that it will end up opening a period of relaxing tensions which will allow the requests of the Catalan independence movement to be brought into the political debate. But on the other hand something is certain: it cannot be worse. The government and the party which have commanded Spain in the last few years are the main culprits for the political situation in Catalonia: for the suppression of its autonomy and its loss of many of the basic freedoms of a western society. Twists of fate, president Carles Puigdemont could be thinking: who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
The Catalan government was kicked out of power by a coup d'état wrapped up in a legal process called article 155 of the Spanish Constitution. It was a back-room deal, a pact between the monarchy, the judiciary, the political parties, the financial establishment and the media. All opaque but all neatly tied up. On the other hand, the Spanish government is about to be kicked out of power openly by 180 deputies but, surprisingly, many of those who in October had leading roles in the assault on the Catalan institutions are now blocking Sánchez's access to power.
We'll have to pay close attention to how the next few hours turn out, those remaining until the vote on the motion of no-confidence, to happen around 2pm this Friday, 1st June. It will then be time to take some perspective on many of the things which have happened in Spain in black and white in the last few years. And, who knows, to lay to rest the judicialisation of politics to make it dignified again. And to put the ball back in the playing field it should never have left: that of democracy, politics and ballot boxes. The Catalan triple request which the independence movement has made its rallying cry for years.