Today, as the authorities drag out and stretch the ECJ ruling, it is a good day to remember how this started. Understanding this as the most ridiculous and degrading legislature of the no longer so young Spanish democracy. The amnesty served to buy an investiture. It allowed the physical occupation of the executive power. Parliamentary support from 7 deputies was bought from some criminals for one vote and no more. The price was the erasure of their crimes. Everything that followed is a consequence of this ominous transaction. If avoiding alternation in power justifies the sacrifice of a basic idea of Justice, almost anything is justified. The sewer is just a coarser, and therefore clandestine, way of trying to prolong the stay in power.
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As the European court has ruled, the amnesty may not oppose the financial interests of the EU or contravene community law on terrorism. More debatable is that the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled that it does not violate the principles of the Magna Carta; but even that does not matter, because the fundamental thing is the spurious end that guides the rule.
The feeling of being cheated by the leaders of Junts and, in particular, Carles Puigdemont is the best proof. After an investiture comes a legislature and the amnesty would only prolong its usefulness if Puigdemont remains, like Zeno of Elea’s arrow, in suspended flight towards his goal, the return to Spain, without ever reaching it. The amnesty was a multiple lie. Today Salvador Illa asks that it be applied «diligently, comprehensively and without subterfuge» and also knows that if the fulfillment of the founding promise of the legislature had been «diligent, comprehensive and without subterfuge», it would have been much more difficult for him to become president of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
What the amnesty perverts is politics. If power can dispense impunity with the sole purpose of hoarding more power, democracy is called into question. As we are seeing, the rot to which this moral dispensation inevitably leads is a natural process, one might say biological. You see that it is even the same person who was in charge of negotiating the amnesty and setting up a sewer in Ferraz. The first has a legalist alibi – precisely by the Government that despises the courts -, the second is unconfessable and therefore clandestine. The end is the same.
