When the noise is thunderous and the hum is constant, it is convenient to resort to data to discover that beyond politics there is no single thought, no framework already installed. That the published opinion, no matter how harsh it may be, is not imposed by decree. And that the distance between perception and reality can be abysmal in these times. An example: the media open every day with different chapters of the Koldo/Ábalos case, the investigation into Begoña Gómez or the accusations of the corrupt businessman Víctor Aldama and the PP speaks of structural corruption in the Government and in Pedro’s personal environment Sánchez, while social reality circulates in a very different lane.
Corruption is not an issue that particularly worries Spaniards today. We are not even close to the records of the 90s of the last century, much less those of 2014, when social unrest due to political scandals reached historic levels in the heat of the case. Púnica, the ‘black cards’, the granting of the third degree to former minister Jaume Matas or the controversy that arose when the private trips that the former Extremaduran president Juan Antonio Monago made to the Canary Islands at the expense of the Senate were revealed.
The CIS of November of that year reflected a growth of 21.5 points in citizen concern in a single month, to the point that corruption was considered the main problem by 63.9% of those surveyed, only surpassed by the arrest. Even the record of 44.5% recorded in March 2013 was left behind, in the midst of the cascade of ‘Bárcenas papers’. What’s more, the boredom of that time even doubled the rates recorded in the 90s, the years of the ‘Roldán’ or ‘Rubio’ cases of the Felipe González governments.
Today, in November 2024, according to the latest CIS barometerpolitical problems, followed by the behavior of public representatives and housing are the problems that most concern citizens, while corruption appears in sixteenth place. Sixteenth. And yet, the framework of the public conversation, in the media and in Parliament, is what it is: the actions of Judge Peinado in the Begoña Gómez case, the judicial harassment of which the Government, Aldama and the gang believe themselves to be victims. of incriminations without any evidence launched by the alleged ringleader of the scheme of commissions and bribes that operated in the Ministry of Transportation during the mandate of José Luis Ábalos.
The issue is not minor. Both because of the uncertain path that the investigations may reveal and because it has already led to what some present as “an institutional clash without precedent in democracy.” This is what the leaders of the PP believe, while the Government denies the majority. And all because Pedro Sánchez said this week that the “opposition plays with the cards marked”, in a veiled allusion to an alleged collusion with certain judges of which the Chief of Staff of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, without going any further, leaves a record every late in announcing court decisions that are pronounced the next day.
The president’s complaint is one more step in the socialists’ strategy of presenting themselves as victims of a media, political and judicial “harassment by the right” campaign, which their Secretary of Organization, Santos Cerdán, has come to describe as a “hunt.” human” against Pedro Sánchez. Nothing that the Podemos leaders had not previously denounced due to the thirty investigations opened in the courts against their leadership and which ended, one after another, with the filing of all the cases. And nothing that M. Rajoy had not practiced before when the courts were investigating the Gürtel case. The difference is that that corrupt plot of the PP ended in a conviction for illegal financing of the party that lives on Génova Street in a headquarters whose works were paid for with black money, as the courts also confirmed.
But the words of the current President of the Government, as is known, are the only ones that seek to end the separation of powers, the rule of law and even democracy. So much so that this Friday the president of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Isabel Perelló, added a statement to the string of insults that the right-wing leaders and their usual spokespersons gave him, in which she criticized the questioning of “in a generalized and permanent manner” the work of judges, attributing “political biases” to them. His reading is that this attitude “undermines citizens’ confidence in Justice, thereby causing serious institutional damage.”
Perelló issued this warning to deny that the judges are in cahoots against the Executive, after Sánchez slipped that the PP has privileged information and, although he did not expressly mention anyone, he did say that accusing the members of the Judiciary of being partisan puts them at risk. the rule of law. In reality, the Government has never spoken of judges in general or of the Judiciary, but rather of “some courts”, “several robes” or a “judicial dome”. For this reason, sources from the Executive described Perelló’s note as “a succession of commonplaces with wooden language” because the Executive shares the concern for the “good name” of the judicial system and “does not take for granted” the generalized attacks. to which the statement refers. Of course, he declares himself concerned about the “cry for judges to take sides” in politics.
The note from the governing body of the judges, which does not supervise the work of the judges nor opens ex officio files if there is no prior complaint to its Ethics Commission, escalates into an institutional clash that, on the other hand, has been the constant since Pedro Sánchez arrived at Moncloa. The president has sometimes made it clear that the opposition to his government “is not political, but media and judicial.” And this is something that the Council of Ministers assumed since it negotiated with Junts the amnesty law that made Sánchez’s investiture possible.
There are ministers who already speak clearly of a strategy of the right and the extreme right to “judicialize political life.” Óscar López has done it, for whom “it cannot be that the only line of opposition is drawn by Clean Hands” with the complaints presented by the pseudo-union in recent months. And all of this, they add from the Government, at a time when Spain’s is the economy that performs best in the entire OECD, growing four times more than the European Union average and breaking employment records with 21.4 million. of Social Security affiliates.
The economy is not the axis of the opposition strategy in a PP that is already preparing a new offensive against the socialists for the last Government control session of the year with what it understands is “harassment of the judges” by Sánchez. Thus, Feijóo will ask the president if attacks on institutions, including those of the Judiciary, are behavior “worthy” of a head of government. And the popular deputy Ester Muñoz will do the same with the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, from whom Miguel Tellado will ask for an “assessment of the Government’s judicial calendar.” And the thing is that between next Monday and Friday, the alleged perpetrator of the Koldo case, the businessman Víctor de Aldama, the former socialist advisor Koldo García and the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez, will go to court to testify.
The year will end, therefore, just as it began, with unbearable noise and with the public and published conversation very far from the problems that really concern citizens.
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