Within a period of just a few days, different Spanish media have offered the same catastrophic vision of the black future that lies ahead in the European verdict on the Catalan independence leaders' trial, and it is a vision that definitively accepts that the independence movement has won an overwhelming international victory in terms of gaining acceptance for the narrative of repression in Spain and, who knows, perhaps also opening the doors to the return of the exiles.
The mood of Spain's senior judiciary is somewhere between melancholy and irritation, and many of those who previously defended the Supreme Court's ruling now aim their barbs at Pedro Sánchez for granting pardons, ignoring that, in this case, the order of the factors does alter the final product. What came first was the condemnation from Europe and the shaming from many political sectors and opinion makers for the fact that in Spain there were political prisoners, and the comparison of the Spanish state with Turkey, as in the recent Council of Europe report which, in the end, is what has definitely opened the Pandora’s box.
And this Sunday the El Mundo newspaper opened its front page with a five-column headline asserting the following: "Our 1st October [referendum trial] sentence is dead in Europe, the battle is lost," a phrase attributed to quotes given to the paper by Supreme Court judges, is something more than just a turning point in the vision of what could happen in Strasbourg. Or this other one from El Español: "The Sánchez government admits the triumph of the pro-independence foreign narrative and fears a beating from European justice." There are quite a few more but they all go in the same direction.
Common sense says that, if the result is good in this way, it is best not to try anything spectacular and this is what must be done with the internationalization of the Catalan independence process from now on, with, fortunately, the political prisoners having already left their cells with a partial pardon. Since 2018 and in the absence of a politically strong Catalan government, the two poles have been the exiles and the prisons. Now, they must be the exiles and the new government headed by Pere Aragonès, complementing each other in the primary goals of most of the independence movement today: an amnesty, a referendum on independence and the constitution of a Catalan republic.
That Pedro Sánchez's executive is not up for the job is nothing new. But neither was it in 2018 and 2019 when he categorically stated that the Spanish government would not give any kind of pardon to the political prisoners and, in the end, he has done so. It is a matter of persistence and bringing out the right shine on the indispensable pro-independence MPs in Madrid.