Now there's a date: this November 17th will be the day that the Court of Accounts trial will begin against the 35 former officials of the Catalan governments of Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont for the spending on the October 1st referendum and the foreign promotion of Catalonia between 2011 and 2017. Among the politicians who are being asked to pay 5.3 million euros by the private prosecution of Societat Civil Catalana - 3.2 million is the figure claimed by the Spanish public prosecutors - there are, in addition to the two ex-presidents, the then vice-president Oriol Junqueras, various former ministers in the Catalan governments of those years, and high-ranking officials of the sottogoverno with an overall total of 35 people. If there is a change of government in Spain, it will be the first trial of the Catalan independence movement with People's Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the Moncloa palace and perhaps even several ministers from far-right Vox.
Although the new Court of Accounts reduced the huge civil liability sum made by its predecessors, it has not been sensitive to something that, in pure logic, could have rendered the judgment void: if the Catalan government has not been harmed, why hold the trial? It is obvious that aside from the political reasons that can be stated, there is no motive. The Court of Accounts wants to show that it is still there, that the so-called dejudicialization has been a scam and that the only tangible thing in these years has been the pardoning of the political prisoners. Something that, at the same time, has created an obvious contradiction, since there are hundreds of legal cases in progress that follow paths different to that in which pardons were approved by the Spanish government. The amendment of the part of the Spanish Penal Code regarding sedition and misuse of public funds did not quite come up to expectations in the treatment it achieved for the misuse of funds offence, as the interpretation made by the Supreme Court was the most damaging to the pro-independence parties of all the options available.
Although the Court of Accounts is not strictly speaking an ordinary court, like the Catalan High Court, the National Court or the Supreme Court, it will serve as a thermometer to know the exact point of the persecution of the Catalan independence movement. It is not good news that the court did not want to step on the accelerator before the Spanish elections on July 23rd - they had time, since events that occurred between 2011 and 2017 are to be tried - but preferred to wait for the possible arrival in Spanish power of the right and the ultra-right. These two parties will not be more sensitive than the Socialists who, although timid, have taken steps on this issue that neither the PP nor Vox have ever taken, for example, in the case of pardons.
What we are seeing these days in the constitution of the Autonomous Community parliaments, and here we can focus, above all, on those of the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands, is the obvious retrogression of many basic rights - in this aspect it is common to those pacts reached between PP and Vox in the rest of the Spanish state - but also, in a very special way, a frontal attack against linguistic rights. The Catalan language will enter a phase of official regression that will affect its social use in public establishments and the educational system. Bearing in mind that Catalan is the nerve of the nation and what defines Catalonia's singularity, it is not the pro-independence bloc that should form a barrier to stop this regressive wave, but something much broader and older, like the defence of the Catalan nation.
And the courts are called to play a role in all this: we will see how court cases that have been moving at a slower pace are speeding up with the promise of a hypothetical new prosecutor general aligned with the right and the ultra-right. And the sentencing, too. Because there is a Madrid that has decided that terrorism and independentism must be placed in the same wagon and the same legislation must be applied to them both.