It was unexpected, and indeed, striking, this Tuesday to hear Esteban González Pons - a politician who is almost always very careful with his language, at least when it comes to state institutions - lashing out at the Spanish Constitutional Court. Above all, because the leadership of the People's Party (PP) has adopted a sharp and scathing discourse against the Catalan independence movement and the Pedro Sánchez government, but until now it had left prosecutors, judges and also the Constitutional Court out of its invective. This last barrier seems to have been broken and the Consitutional Court has become part of the new line-up of enemies of the PP. You only have to listen to the forcefulness employed by the party's deputy secretary of institutional affairs: "The cancer of the rule of law is the Constitutional Court presided over by Cándido Conde-Pumpido", he categorically asserted.
It is a curious way of presenting himself for a state party, which until now had left the Spanish institutions out of the partisan clash. During the short time since this legislature began, the PP has gone against the Congress of Deputies and its speaker, the Socialist (PSOE) politician Francina Armengol, whom it has labeled as "Minister No 22" and accused of incompetence and sectarianism. And now it has opened fire against the Constitutional Court and Conde-Pumpido, dragging the prestige of Spain's court of guarantees through the mud. In the discussion held by the Círculo Ecuestre - surely the most conservative public platform in the Catalan capital - González Pons let it slip that the PP might stop appealing laws before this court, without clarifying if this means that it will not take the amnesty law to the court. His argument is out of place for a member of what are usually called the parties of the state, a phrase that from the Spanish point of view only applies to the PP and the PSOE.
The thesis set out by González Pons that if the PP does not present appeals, it will take away from the "Conde-Pumpido Constitutional Court the possibility of being able to change the Constitution", is largely fallacious and is calculated to appeal to Vox voters, with a discourse that almost dips into with Trumpism and embodies the stamp of Isabel Díaz Ayuso more than that of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. I suspect that with the Galician autonomous community election on the horizon and the need for Vox to remain at zero deputies, there will be strategists defending the need to make concessions to this group, but they must be very sure that they have a well-founded discourse on the other side. If not, the risk that it will end up undermining the Contitutional Court, simply because the PP has lost control of it after the latest changes and Conde-Pumpido has gone on to lead a key body, will be unstoppable.
The PP has started down a path whose return journey is very difficult, based on three premises: control of the street, justice as a weaponized tool, and the third, apparently, will be to fiercely attack institutions like the Constitutional Court so as to discredit them
Insisting on the option for the PP to consider no longer making use of the TC, based on its argument that the institution is falling into historic discredit, brings it closer to discourses used in other latitudes where the institutions are only deemed to be important if a given leader has them in his pocket. The PP has started down a path whose return journey is very difficult, based on three premises: control of the street, imposing a rhythm of demonstrations so that all its voters are mobilized against the independence movement and pointing to Pedro Sánchez as the facilitator of the transformation towards a state in which making concessions to continue in power is the order of the day; secondly, justice as a weaponized tool that replaces government in the defence of the unity of Spain and in the persecution of the Catalan independentists. And the third aspect, apparently, will be to fiercely attack institutions like the Consitutional Court in order to discredit them.
Maybe the PP of some point in the future will have swallowed up Vox, but, along the way, it will have burned its chances of reaching agreements with anyone, since it will be seen as a danger to democracy.