At this time, confusion about the Amnesty law and the future of the legislature is maximum. The situation has become more tangled than could be imagined. Given the unacceptable behavior of some judges, motivated purely by political strategy, Junts demands guarantees and security in the application of the amnesty that the Government cannot provide. With the law you can go up to a certain point, but it is impossible to completely shield it from the increasingly crazy ideas of judges determined to sabotage its future application.
In the midst of this controversy, I would like to take advantage of the prevailing confusion to introduce an additional dimension to the amnesty that has barely been debated. The origin of my reflection is found in a message on social networks that José Luis Ábalos posted a few days ago regarding the revelations published by La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es about the dirty play of Mariano Rajoy’s Government against the Catalan independence movement. The message closed with these words: “In the end, those who are going to need the amnesty are going to be Fernández Díaz and Rajoy. “On time!” I understand that it was an irony, a joke. However, I think there are good reasons to take the idea seriously.
Let’s look at it a little calmly. The Government of Spain is facing a complicated situation, not only because of the opposition from the political and judicial right, but because its president, before the elections, categorically ruled out that an amnesty was possible. For this reason, he has been forced to justify his turn. The justifications range from “making necessity a virtue” to improving coexistence in Catalonia. Perhaps this last argument is the most used: thanks to the amnesty, a new period of political harmony will open. In my opinion, this line of argument, although very useful, is not entirely convincing, for several reasons.
Firstly, political tension within Catalonia and between Catalonia and the rest of Spain had already greatly decreased following the granting of the pardons and the shift towards greater pragmatism by the Generalitat. From this point of view, it could be argued that, with the possibility of a PP-Vox government removed for a time, it was no longer necessary to continue moving forward with the grace measures.
Secondly, it is problematic to speak of concord if in the future the amnestied return to the unilateral strategy of breaking with the State. It must be remembered, for example, that in the 1977 amnesty the prisons were emptied of ETA members, which did not prevent the ETA members from not only continuing their terrorist activity, but even intensifying it significantly after the approval of the Constitution in December 1978. Concord as the main reason for the amnesty could, therefore, turn against the Government if the territorial conflict escalates again (which cannot be completely ruled out).
In reality, although the Sánchez Government does not want or cannot openly recognize it, the first reason for the amnesty is the confirmation that Spanish democracy failed to resolve the Catalan problem. By this I mean that the actors involved did not live up to what can be expected in a solid and deep democracy. Rajoy’s government refused to explore a negotiated solution and implemented secret operations to weaken the independence movement.
For its part, the independence movement embarked on a disruptive and unilateral path, without counting on the support of a majority of the Catalan population in this undertaking. Furthermore, the courts initiated a kind of general case against the independence movement, twisting the law with implausible accusations and taking preventive measures that seriously interfered with the electoral process. Given this accumulation of errors, there is no choice but to conclude that this was a collective failure and that the best thing that can be done in the current circumstances is to try to turn the page and begin a new stage. This, it seems to me, is the clearest and most powerful justification for the amnesty.
For this way of understanding the amnesty to be fully coherent, I believe that, as far as the central State is concerned, it must be included in it, not only the police officers denounced for the charges of October 1, but also the politicians and State officials. who participated in the dirty war operations against the independence movement. Operation Catalunya and its derivatives should be included in overcoming the conflict. Espionage and defamation compete in severity with the constitutional disloyalty of the independence leaders.
The Spanish right would probably understand this extensive interpretation of the amnesty as a provocation. Until now, the protagonists of the dirty game in Rajoy’s Government have felt unpunished, as they counted on the negligence of the courts, which have chosen to mess around, as is popularly said, instead of shedding light and doing justice. This double standard, however, cannot be maintained indefinitely and at some point some judge will end up taking charge of the matter.
The main advantage of exploring this route is that the Government could present the amnesty as a generous and fair exercise of forgetfulness that applies to all parties and not as a result of “blackmail” by Catalan nationalism. There is no better proof of open-mindedness than amnestying all those whose actions were unworthy of democratic principles.
