No jail time for friendly politicians in Spain
Sánchez gets ready to pardon another political ally despite jail sentence but Popular Party is only worried the PM didn't ring to do a deal first.
Subscribe now on Substack. Your €15/month guarantees this independent reporting and analysis.
It's not a difficult concept to understand: the same laws should be applicable in the same way to everyone in society, with the same standards of judgement, to everyone in society, and the people best suited to doing that in a democracy are judges. That way, at least justice is perceived to be relatively fair and at the same time we manage to separate that judicial power from the executive, the government, the legislative power, the parliament, and the police. All of the different bits more or less work together with different types of power to produce a bit of a better society for all of us to live in together. So when El Confidencial reports, as it has done today, that the Sánchez government is preparing to pardon another politician convicted by the courts of multiple millions of euros of another fraud and sentenced to several years in jail for his crime, we have a problem.
The government's argument is that it cannot not pardon their political friend Griñán (PSOE) because they already pardoned their Catalan separatist friend Junqueras (Esquerra). This is "equity" and "justice" and "the personal circumstances of the accused" must be taken into account. But only those of their political friend, Griñán, mind you, who was the socialist First Minister of Andalusia and now there is also a national socialist government. And two former socialist Prime Ministers, Felipe González and Zapatero, think it's a great idea. "Not resolving this in a positive manner for Griñán would create a serious 'problem in the PSOE'", writes El Confidencial. A messy problem. For the Socialist Party. They take it for granted that the conservative Popular Party "does not want to cause bloodshed" and that Podemos and Izquierda Unida will be "careful" about the matter. Absolute respect for the courts, except when it comes to our friend Griñán or our other friend Junqueras because one was our boss in the south and we need the other guy's votes to keep governing the country with our minority coalition.
"I want to express absolute respect and compliance with the ruling of the Supreme Court on the part of the government of Spain", said Pedro Sánchez: "In a social and democratic state of law, compliance means full compliance",. The latest statement by Feijóo, the new leader of the Popular Party, is no less shocking: "I have no interest in seeing a President of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, former minister and First Minister of Andalusia in jail", he said in La Coruña a few days ago, specifying that was neither a personal interest nor a political one. It seemed from his words that what really bothers him is not Griñán's pardon but that Sánchez is doing it without calling the PP to to a deal first: "without talking to anyone, without explaining to anyone, and without informing anyone, not even the majority opposition party". Those comments came in the same press conference in which he spoke about the non-reform of the judicial power in Spain, that the PSOE and the PP have been negotiating for years.
The political class, political elites, inaccessible to normal citizens with Spain's closed-list electoral system, are stopping members of the political class from going to jail again, despite criminal convictions from the highest court in the land, because that is not how Spanish democracy works. They just need to negotiate the details.
Subscribe now on Substack. Your €15/month guarantees this independent reporting and analysis.