Confiscated by police: yellow t-shirts featuring independence slogans, yellow balloons, yellow whistles, banners with slogans such as "Freedom for political prisoners" and Catalan pro-independence estelada flags. All of these were removed from Barça fans who went to Madrid to attend the final of the King's Cup football tournament, leaving a sensation that mixes that of the end of a political era with one of ridicule. Forty-one years after Spain's first democratic elections in 1977 at the end of Franco's long dictatorship, the image of the police confiscating yellow t-shirts from Barça fans as if they were flares or some sort of inflammable material, or even something worse, shows the dark side of a state that on Saturday expressed in grotesque fashion its understanding of freedom of expression.
That all this has happened in the week that the Spanish state has imploded due to an unmitigated battle between a judge, the Civil Guard and a government minister, is a bitter metaphor for today's Spain: exposed before Europe for inventing such serious charges as the crimes of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds against fifteen people, most of them members of the Catalan government sacked under Spain's implementation of direct rule in Catalonia, along with the former speaker of the Catalan Parliament Carme Forcadell and civil group leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart. It seems that Spain expects nothing good to come from the European arrest warrants activated in a number of countries, who can see that one of the alleged offences is denied even by Spanish treasury minister Montoro.
Right now, hardly anyone doubts that Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena, obsessed with non-existent crimes, has opened a can of worms for the state thanks to the many errors in the handling of the case. Media communicator Xavier Sardà, radically opposed to pro-independence theses, wrote an article on Saturday asking judge Llarena to "let it go", as "the state is losing the game".
To be sure, those rubbish bins, filled with yellow t-shirts are an epitaph for politicians who need to demonstrate what authority means.
How sad!