Long live Puigdemont | By Julio Llamazares

That the governance of a country of 48 million people be in the hands of a fugitive from justice of that country is the demonstration that something is wrong with it. We can argue what we want, but no one imagines that the election of a Pope depends on a cardinal expelled from the Church for his disloyalty to it or that the renovation of a building is decided by that neighbor who does not pay the bills or never attend meetings. of the community. But in Spain, a country where everything you can imagine happens, we have reached that situation. If someone had told us just a month ago we would have thought he was doing science fiction, but science fiction has come true and all of us Spaniards are here waiting for what a character decides in Belgium who, after putting the country on the verge of civil confrontation, escaped from it in the trunk of a car, leaving his advisers stranded and since then lives a golden exile paid for by all that thousands of other Spaniards who had to go into exile would have already wanted, they did, due to the persecution of a dictatorship. Not even Manuel Azana, the President of the Spanish Republic, enjoyed the comfort that Puigdemont enjoys in his “exile & rdquor; Belgian in the few months that he lived it.

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But if the situation described is grotesque (not to use another adjective), the show they offer these days is no less so. our politicians openly or covertly begging for support of someone who until very recently was described as disloyal – the most moderate – or as a traitor and coward, the most direct. Seeing democratic politicians winking at a fugitive from justice to help them come to power in a State they despise and which they faced in their day is as pathetic and embarrassing as reading the courted statements stating that does not trust the Spanish political parties (He, who betrayed his word privately and publicly on numerous occasions and who breached his obligation as President of Catalonia to comply with and enforce the law in the territory as he promised when he took office).

Whatever finally happens at the inauguration to the presidency of the Spanish Government (for the moment, the courtship was only for the constitution of the Congress table, which will finally be chaired by a socialist), the damage has already been done and the two great Spanish parties are responsible for it, those whose mouths fill up talking of the Constitution and the law and that they do not hesitate to twist them or directly break them when they are interested, as they have once again demonstrated by negotiating their interpretation with a fugitive from justice who also insults them by telling them that they are not to be trusted. The rest of the parties, both those that oppose these negotiations head-on, even those that would like, like Vox, to see Puigdemont hanged (metaphorically or really), as well as those that defend their own independence ideas, an option as legitimate and democratic as any other as long as it is legally prosecuted, they are just the extras of a show so embarrassing that it should shame its protagonists instead of presenting it to us Spaniards as the natural exercise of democracy, that word that justifies everything. Luckily the holidays soften it and move us away and that we are already seasoned in filibustering, that variant of flexibility that our politicians dominate and exercise so well, that, yes, they always attribute it to their opponents, claiming sainthood for themselves. Long live Puigdemont!

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