The Catalangate espionage scandal raised its head at the municipal plenary session of the Barcelona City Council this Friday, but then the issue was dropped again. On the one hand, the council did announce this week that it will lodge a complaint over the espionage carried out against two city councillors, Ernest Maragall and Elsa Artadi, after it became known that Spain's CNI intelligence centre had used spyware to monitor the crucial negotiations to form a municipal government after the May 2019 elections. But on the other, this Friday an attempt by the pro-independence Junts party to obtain council backing to make a “strong condemnation of espionage against the pro-independence politicians of Barcelona City Council” only found the support of fellow pro-independence party ERC, also targeted by Pegasus software, while the rest of the groups, including Ada Colau's group and her allies the Socialists, voted against.
The proposal called for the "energetic" condemnation of the espionage against Maragall and Artadi - the latter retiring from politics but still holding her status as a city councillor until the end of this Friday's plenary, although she did not attend - but it also referred to other aspects, such as “condemning the creation of false evidence” against former mayor Xavier Trias, who was defeated by Colau in the 2015 election, “denouncing the intention to illegally affect the election results or spy on the post-election pacts in the last two municipal elections in the city of Barcelona" and finally, it made a “request for the declassification of documents relating to espionage against both past and present members of the plenary of the Barcelona City Council and to documents related to the Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty”.
In fact, the mixture of demands in the motion were labelled as a "mishmash" by the groups that voted against them, despite the fact that the new leader of the Junts municipal group, Neus Munté, defended the proposal as a sign of the existence of the "sordid and pestilent sewers of the state" and demanded to "restore the honour of mayor Trias." She only had the support of ERC, which called for a reaction from the council in the face of attacks by "sewers that attack the independence movement", as Elisenda Alamany put it.
"What do you think the Mossad does?"
Outside the pro-independence support for the motion, the rest of the speeches were very critical of the proposal. The president of the Ciudadanos group, Luz Guilarte, referred to it as pataleta-gate ("tantrum-gate"), while the Partido Popular's Josep Bou justified the espionage: "What do you think the Israeli Mossad, the British MI or the CIA of the United States when there are people who want to destroy their country?" asked the PP municipal leader, warning that "when people say 'we'll do it again', the nation must defend itself". Both the PSC and Barcelona en Comú questioned the appropriateness of presenting a proposal that mixes situations that, in their view "have nothing to do with" the issue, such as the espionage against mayor Trias and the known connections between the CNI and the imam of Ripoll, the brain behind the 2017 Rambla terrorist attack, and they thus justified their vote against the motion.