The decision on Wednesday night by the president of the Spanish Constitutional Court to call a plenary meeting of the body for 10am on Thursday, with a single item on the agenda - the People's Party (PP) appeal to prevent the judicial reform proposed by Pedro Sánchez in the Congress of Deputies - is a fact of enormous gravity. It signifies an assault, or at least, an attack by the judges closest to the PP, attempting quite openly to block decisions that do not belong to the judicial powers and are strictly part of the political powers. The infernal rustling of the legal gowns, having arisen as the only power of the destructured Spanish state, presents a more important battle than it seems. Not only over whether there is separation of powers between the legislative and judicial powers, something fundamental and basic in a democracy, but to confirm if it is true that Montesquieu's famous separation of powers is no longer even necessary, because the only existing power is the judicial one that does things and undoes them at its leisure.
The tense adjectives being used against the Constitutional Court and the manoeuvres being attempted by the right are, without a doubt, the most severe that have ever been heard of. In fact, the judges are accused directly of attempting a coup with their worrying intervention. A real arm-twist has been applied by a judiciary that is not willing to lose what it has won and does not want to return to its offices and only issue rulings. And in this battle, which is being fought exclusively in Madrid, strange as it may seem, Pedro Sánchez's PSOE is in a clear minority. And he is suffering: the judiciary has never dared to stand up to a Spanish prime minister with the institutional disloyalty that they are employing. And what is more important: the judges are being hailed by some media players, many of whom have stopped being simply right-wing to become truly extremist.
Somewhere, over these recent hours, I read the question of where the king might be at this time. It didn't seem like a rhetorical question, but rather a call for help. Either there is a lot of naivety or there is a lot of candour. Because Felipe VI is making a very sui generis interpretation of his constitutional role: he acted as a politician over Catalonia's October 1st referendum, going beyond his competences and receiving and listening to the chants of the PP and Vox, rising above his own attributions Those of us who said that the decision to leave in the hands of justice certain exclusively-political decisions during the Catalan process would leave a debt in Spanish democracy that would have to be paid, because it gave a role to the gown-clad jurists that did not correspond to them: we were not wrong.
The thing is, it was easy to applaud Marchena, Lesmes, Llarena and company when it came to condemning leaders of the Catalan independence movement. Here they all talked about the independence of justice; what a beautiful phrase and so rarely true. Now, with the forces of independence scrapping in their own misfortunes, the trophy to be bagged by the senior judiciary goes directly by the name of Pedro Sánchez and it cannot be said that they do not devote maximum interest to this. I don't know how the extraordinary and urgent session of the Constitutional Court will end and whether it will decide to stop the reform of the judiciary which is underway. It would be a full-on assault on the institutions that would turn upside down the functioning one should expect of a state, one which keeps repeating time and time again that it is a consolidated democracy. While the facts betray it every day and in front of the mirror there appears, more and more often, the naked king.