In a current situation, in which Catalan political power has been intimidated by the wide scale of state repression, it must be acknowledged that the Spanish judiciary has, in the end, entered completely into the very bowels of the Catalan autonomous community's micropower, which, today, is absolutely emptied of real competencies. Four cases from this week, before it has even finished, serve to illustrate this: the courts give a five-day ultimatum for the application of the 25% Castilian language quota in classrooms; the Central Electoral Commission does the same, giving another five days to the speaker of parliament, Laura Borràs, to withdraw the seat of the CUP deputy for Lleida, Pau Juvillà, and warns her that she will incur legal consequences, a phrase whose meaning we are all aware of; the National Audience refuses to investigate whether the imam of Ripoll is alive and did not die in the Alcanar accident prior to the terror attacks on the Rambla and Cambrils in August 2017; and, to put the icing on the cake and show that they are the ones who decide what can and cannot be done, the High Court of Catalonia has returned to the Francoist minister Rodolfo Martín Villa the gold medal of Barcelona that the Catalan capital's city council had decided to withdraw from him with the support of all municipal groups except Cs and the PP. And a final flourish: the Supreme Court will, on March 1st and 2nd, put on trial the CUP deputy Eulàlia Reguant for refusing to respond to Vox in the Supreme Court trial of pro-independence leaders, when, surely, in no other European country would the far-right party have been accepted by the court as a private prosecution.
Each of these cases in itself contains enough for a series of articles, as it is really difficult to make a positive reflection on the situation and the response that the institutions have managed to give to what is nothing other than an authentic storm that was seen approaching, and to which the pro-independence parties have been unable to offer a coordinated response. On the contrary: they are busy in their internal guerrilla war, trying to achieve hegemony in Catalonia when the real risk is that whoever ends up winning will not have a country to govern, since the Spanish state will have done its job: disarming the independence movement for quite a few years and, in practice, making its parliamentary majorities worthless as nothing important ends up in their hands. And when it does, they are cut off.
Last Tuesday, Catalan vice president Jordi Puigneró made public in Parliament some facts that are appalling and unacceptable. As he explained in the chamber, of the 334 million budgeted for 2021 by the Pedro Sánchez government for the Mediterranean transport corridor, only 12 million were actually spent. Meanwhile, of the 226 million budgeted for the Andalusian corridor, twice as much was spent, 537 million euros. In case it is not clear: 12 million were invested in the Mediterranean corridor and 537 in Andalusia. It is really impossible to fight against this dynamic in Spain, which takes away competencies and suffocates not only those supporting independence but the whole of the Catalan population making it impossible for the country to move forward to towards a prosperous country able to fulfill the real potential that its GDP shows.
Of all the cases set out above, probably the most flagrant due to its political significance and the one that best exemplifies that the judges have decided everything is the one that affects the withdrawal of the Barcelona city gold medal from Martín Villa. Isn't it popular sovereignty and in this case its political representatives who should decide whether or not to withdraw a gold medal awarded by the city? It is not, in its deeper substance, a matter over which a decision has to be made by justice. An average citizen, someone who doesn't know about laws, finds it difficult to understand that one council can grant such a special recognition and another, years later, cannot withdraw it. When, in addition, we are talking about a minister of a Franco-era government.
But in Spain, all this ends up acquiring an air of normality. And, in Catalonia, a tragic fatalism that cannot be combated. Thus, every day there is less capacity to respond while more and more fronts are open. Of course, we'll always send off a good tweet. No need to mention that.