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Some day, Spanish democrats will have to thank Carles Puigdemont for his efforts and sacrifices to reveal the decline of the political and institutional system in the Spanish state. Only the truth will set them free. And the truth is that European justice has discredited its Spanish counterpart in an act without precedents of such importance since general Franco's dictatorship. This Spanish Armada wasn't ready either to fight against the elements... of European democracy.

It's not all over, far from it, but, whatever happens from here on, it's clear that president Puigdemont's initiative to go into exile to internationalise the Catalan conflict and seek intervention from impartial judges has been a success.

Now king Felipe of Bourbon would have a hard time repeating the speech Mariano Rajoy entrusted him with in Davos to proclaim that Spain is a country under the rule of law, and not only for the Catalan issue... Spain is again experiencing a political crisis akin to a perfect storm. Spanish justice has been discredited in Europe. Mariano Rajoy's government promised its allies political and economic stability and has neither one nor the other. The corruption cases continue weighing like a sack of lead on an executive incapable of reaching an agreement to pass a budget. All that was missing was the scandal over Cristina Cifuentes, the president of the autonomous community of Madrid, and her mysterious Masters, which definitively counts her out as the successor to Rajoy who was meant to clean up the image of the continent's dirtiest party.

The case of Cristina Cifuentes isn't a minor matter, because it's also done irreparable harm to the prestige of Spanish universities. A country, suspicious even in the issuing of academic titles, doesn't make the grade in the West. It's the brand image of a banana monarchy, where just this minute the main television entertainment is worsening the crisis of state: the public quarrel between the two queens has sent audience figures skyrocketing.

In any case, the decision by the Schleswig-Holstein court to discount extraditing Puigdemont to Spain for the crime of rebellion will mark a before and an after in the general criminal case against the Catalan independence movement. The German judges believe the charge of rebellion is "inadmissible from the outset" because they don't see "violence" in the actions attributed to the Catalan president and which figure in the legal investigation, built up based on fake stories constructed by collaborating police and journalists.

When German justice discredits judge Pablo Llarena's handling of the case in that which forms the essential nucleus of the accusation against Puigdemont, the incriminating strategy collapses. So, the pretrial detention being suffered in Estremera and Alcalá-Meco by those who, on 1st October, were subordinates in the Catalan government becomes, from the European point of view, a flagrant violation of rights which, sooner or later, the Spanish state will have to admit and correct.

Now it is clearer than ever that Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn, Jordi Turull, Josep Rull, Raül Romeva, Carme Forcadell, Dolors Bassa, likewise Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez, are unjustly in prison, when impartial German, Belgian, Danish, British and Swiss judges have released Puigdemont and the other exiled ministers, Antoni Comín, Lluís Puig, Meritxell Serret and Clara Ponsatí. Here you have irrefutable evidence of the regression of democracy in Spain.