We recognize European justice as an indisputable virtue: one learns of judgments on the day and at the right time. It is not a matter that can be taken as a joke. The non-existence of leaks, beyond respect for litigants, makes clear the judge’s unwillingness to prop up political narratives in collusion with the media. The Spanish courts would do well to take note of this way of proceeding, since forms are, in any matter that concerns the human, the main transmission belt of virtues and defects.
The General Court of the EU (TGUE) this time has declared the Spanish justice victorious without nuances in its pulse with Carles Puigdemont. The Supreme Court and judge Pablo Llarena are clearly strengthened. The appeal that has already been announced does not question the clarity and certainty of the facts. Even if the last word is missing, the reading today is unequivocal: the former president has a narrow playing field in the two fields in which the party has been contested since the first day: the legal and the political.
In the most conjunctural political plan, the sentence prevents Carles Puigdemont from becoming the main focus of the campaign. As long as the PP does not intend to patrimonialize the European decision to appease the PSOE and force a change in the public conversation, moving it away from the agreements with Vox and focusing it on Catalonia. A question that the Spanish right always tends to consider opportune and favorable to its interests when the polls are close. It can also give oxygen to Pablo Llarena to urgently activate new Euroorders. Or both at the same time if your interests coincide. In both cases it would be the adversary – political or judicial – who would give the ex-president the title in the campaign party. For now, the TGUE has sent him to the bench.
In the halls of political parties and also among journalists there was the fear – Puigdemont continues to do so, as his ability to destabilize the political board is not disputed by anyone – that the decision of the TGUE located at the epicenter of campaign start a victorious former president of the Generalitat, monopolizing the political agenda or even crossing the Pyrenees back. It would have been holy water for the PP-Vox-Junts trio and an ordeal for the PSOE-ERC couple. Once this hypothesis has faded, Puigdemont, as in the goose game when the token falls into the maze, moves back to box 30. Further back from the position he had reached when the dice were more favorable to him.
But focused on Catalonia, and no matter how much fuel Junts tries to burn to achieve it, the Puigdemont case will not hijack the electoral sprint. The ex-president falls off the poster. First, because so many years of singing the praises of European justice since sovereignty would now prevent any claims that sought to detract from its credibility from being credible. Carles Puigdemont himself has reiterated his confidence in community justice despite the setback suffered, even if he has immediately begun the task of discrediting it by taking on some aspects of the sentence. You can charge against the decision, but not with the harshness that has been used without exception against the decisions of the Spanish courts. There is therefore no capacity for electoral mobilization in the decision of the TGUE. And secondly, because only JxCat has an interest in keeping the balloon of exile inflated, which causes indifference to ERC – despite disguising it by keeping its general secretary, Marta Rovira, in Switzerland – and to the CUP, so to speak another way, neither cold nor hot. It would be necessary to add the ANC and the Council for the Republic to the equation, but these entities are no more than nanosatellites, like ex-councilor Clara Ponsatí on an individual level, unable to cause the slightest wave in the public conversation. Puigdemont stays out of the 23- J. Unless the PP, Llarena, or both, decide otherwise.
