The ultimatum by the High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) requiring the Catalan education ministry to comply "immediately" with the court ruling imposing 25% of classroom hours in Spanish in all schools in Catalonia is a clear reflection of the extent to which justice has taken control of what can and cannot be done by supplanting the executive and legislative branches of government. People can look the other way, but the Spanish state is marching rapidly towards a situation where the Catalan government's room for manoeuvre is constricted to an extreme that is insulting. Four weeks ago this Monday we witnessed the emergence of Catalangate, and although the CNI has declared itself responsible, only, so far, for the espionage against 18 of the 65 independence movement-linked people infected with Pegasus software, it is worth taking time to look, even for a few moments, at the espionage recognized with regard to these 18: the CNI, that is, the Spanish government, asked for permission to spy on, among others, the president of Catalonia. And the Supreme Court granted it.
Both cases are nothing more than the reflection of how Catalan politics revolves around Spanish justice. If in 1981, after Tejero's attempted coup d'état, the LOAPA law was passed to reorient the role of the new autonomous communities to please the army, putting an end to any differentiation of Catalonia and the Basque Country, and the famous café para todos, the same medicine for everyone, was agreed on and, with it, the limits to the model; then, in the year 2000, under the absolute majority of José María Aznar's Peoples Party, a further step was taken in the uniformization model of the regions that, in this case, led to the conversion of Madrid into the Spanish financial capital, thanks to the privatization of a number of large state-owned corporations. Now, after the referendum of October 1st, the role of that army of 1981 as an element which forced the cohesion of an idea of Spain driven by the deep state has given way to a situation which is seemingly much less tragic but just as effective: through the justice system.
In recent years we have seen a multitude of issues in which it has been shamelessly clear that justice has assumed responsibilities that are not its own. It is difficult to find a similar situation in countries around us. Because in addition to the anomaly of courts deciding on the educational programme in Catalonia, one could add the TSJC deciding on what date the autonomous elections should be held or granting and taking away seats in Parliament, including something so exceptional as the removal of a Catalan president like Quim Torra for an act as insignificant as hanging a banner on the balcony of the Generalitat palace. We could give many more examples, but all would lead to the same conclusion: today weighty political decisions can end up being taken with absolute normality by Spanish justice and everyone ends up treating it as the most normal thing in the world.
This is because justice has been let off its leash and the institution has understood that there are no limits to its actions, nor folders in which it cannot enter because it would be out of order for it to do so. But let us return to the TSJC's ultimatum that the ruling favouring a 25% quota of Spanish must be imposed on Catalán schools. The Catalan minister of education, Josep González-Cambray, has said that he will appeal the ultimatum and has described the Catalan court's interlocutory statement as aberrant. We will see what the appeal is based on, but the feeling is that the Catalan government is playing every round of the match in a smaller ring in which the margins for political activity have disappeared. Among other things, because the Spanish government has given up doing the work expected of a progressive executive and has made it clear, that behind the declarative frame from which it asserts that the language issue should not be subject to politics, it clearly is, and greatly so.
The Catalan parties have tried to work on a political agreement in Parliament that avoids the strict positioning of the TSJC but, as always, political agreements, however broad, do not convince justice, which has its own agenda, if not a viewpoint that is highly unique, and one that is, make no mistake, not very permeable to the Catalan language. Therefore, returning the language immersion situation to the starting box is an impossible task and can only be agreed to from a position of grave inferiority.