The English term lawfare was invented to refer to what we are experiencing in Spain, the attempt to change through the action of judges and courts what the majority of citizens have decided at the polls.
Many of my socialist friends are now discovering that a significant part of the judicial power of the Kingdom of Spain is politically very militant and acts in sync with the political and media right. They no longer rule out that some arbitrary judge requests the indictment of the President of the Government for a crime more ghostly than a three-euro coin, and that some insidious chamber of the Supreme Court processes that indictment, which would place us in an unprecedented political crisis. Welcome to reality, friends.
The socialists pay for their naivety – or interested complicity – of so many years by proclaiming that justice in Spain was unbeatable and our democracy was practically perfect. They looked the other way when prosecutors and judges from the Torquemada school persecuted puppeteers, rappers, comedians, independence activists, podemites and other people with bad lives. They called the doubts about the excellence of the system radical, exaggerated and paranoid until they came directly for them after the elections of July 23, 2023.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we Spaniards lived under a permanent and terrifying saber rattling. It was not possible to expect great advances in the newly established democracy because many uniformed men openly ranted in the barracks against the course adopted by Spain after the death of the Caudillo, and, even worse, they threatened to rectify it by force of arms. In fact, some got down to work on February 23, 1981, except that they went too far and the superiors ended up deciding that they could not approve that coup.
The myth of the exemplary Transition and the perfection of our democracy was built in the second half of the 1980s, when money from Europe rained on Spain and the splendor of 1992 was being prepared. Felipe González, who had never really been on the left, He made it dogma of the PSOE.
The Transition was the result of a correlation of forces in which the reformers of Franco’s regime continued to maintain the friendship of money and the power of the State, and the democrats expressed the majority feelings of the people. Nothing else could be done, certainly, but from there to considering it excellent, there is an intellectual and moral abyss. Regarding our entry into Europe, it brought us undoubted economic and civic advantages. Among the last, the almost impossibility of a military coup d’état.
So what we experience now is the noise of togas. Many judges have decided to come out of the closet, confess and practice their right-wing and even far-right political militancy and do everything they can to ensure that the progressive coalition government falls as soon as possible. They are enthusiastically cheered on by the PP and Vox and the vast majority of the major media, whose owners are as ideologically conservative as they are neoliberal when it comes to money.
The English term lawfare It was invented, precisely, to allude to what we are experiencing in Spain and other Western countries, the attempt to change through the action of judges and courts what the majority of citizens have decided at the polls. This is what the Brazilian Lula suffered at the end of the last decade, for example. But until recently Spanish socialists indignantly denied that something similar could happen in Spain. No, doubting the probity of each and every one of our robes was a serious sin.
This fall, however, socialists are getting a cruel reality check. The amnesty to processes approved by Parliament is not fully applied because many judges hate it. The state attorney general is come on for denying a hoax about Ayuso’s Rasputin. President Sánchez’s wife suffers what Josef K, the protagonist of The process by Kafka. And Sánchez himself is probably punished for contempt or something like that for having refused to respond – to the fullest extent of the law, it should be noted – to Peinado’s interrogation.
I am not saying that, being a government party, the socialists should have publicly questioned the Transition, the independence of our judges and the quality of our democracy. No, what I am saying is that they should not have abandoned the critical judgment of reality – there is what it is, but we are going to try to improve it – and they should never have demonized those of us who warned that the king is naked.
#noise #togas
