XAVIER VIDAL-FOLCH – 18 SET 2020
The President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, leaves the Supreme Court, this Thursday in Madrid. VICTOR SAINZ
None of the allegations launched yesterday in Madrid against the Supreme Court by Quim Torra are worth – neither legally, nor politically, nor morally – anything at all.
The defendant alleges that he is being tried for making use of the fundamental right to free expression.
False. He is tried for disobeying the electoral board, although he also snubbed the highest Catalan court. To place a partisan banner not in his private home, but in the public building par excellence of all Catalans. For violating the duty of neutrality that the Palau de la Generalitat has, and therefore undermining the rights of all citizens, opponents of the banner and their supporters.
The defendant alleges that he is being tried for leading the Government of the Generalitat, since the court “wants to bring down another president.” In the petulance of comparing himself with the most empathetic and imaginative Carles Puigdemont, Torra adds the falsehood that the Supreme Court caused the fall of Puigdemont: it could not be like that because he had already fled to Waterloo, via Brussels.
But, in addition, by stepping on the neutrality of the institution’s headquarters, the inmate did not act as president of all Catalans, but of himself. He is not judged for being the head of the presidency, but for allegedly committing a crime in his exercise.
The defendant alleges that the court is partial, that the process is “aberrant” and that the State (which he precisely represents in Catalonia) “steps on” democracy and subjects us to “judicial arbitrariness.” Thus he despises an elementary principle of democracy: it is the judiciary that controls the executive power and not the other way around. And when adding that the system was born from “a Transition” that he now discovers as “inherited from Francoism”, he repudiates the party for which he was elected deputy, since this party is heir to a very prominent party of this same Transition and would contribute as one of the most important political parties to the Statute of Catalonia and to the Constitution. If Miquel Roca, then leader of this party, were an heir to the Franco regime, how how could he be born in exile, the real exile?
The defendant alleges that everyone was promised the freedom to say everything they wanted, also about secession, and that on the other hand, this democratic exercise is now prevented by judicial persecution: he again confuses free expression, of which all have – he himself used it yesterday ad nauseam – with executive acts of an authority that contravene the current legal order.
In short, the defendant errs, even in minute details, since his disqualification would not imply the “fall” of his Government, he has already damaged it recently, stripping it of freethinking sovereignists such as Miquel Buch or Ángeles Chacón, and in any case it may continue under a more thoughtful president, like his rival Pere Aragonés.
Neither disabling it is synonymous with the “end” of this legislature, which he himself certified on January 29 and which he promised to execute, in clear political perjury.
Nor is there “punishment for a country” in the middle of a pandemic: the trauma for the Catalan nation is being subjected to so much madness.
In all this, the activist shows that he despises the world of democratic rules as much – which he should know as a lawyer that he was, although without success – as other enlightened populists, like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump; by his side, some giants.
But that is not all, in perpetuating himself in office and refusing again to call the elections he promised – now with the excuse of the pandemic, a cheap excuse since it has been almost as disastrous in facing it as Isabel Díaz Ayuso -, advocates the confrontation of the alleged defense of the figure of the presidency.
It is the same Institutional contempt he shows against his own Government, which it remodels according to partisan whims; against Parliament, which he seeks to muddle in illegality, and the rest of the institutions and entities of self-government. President of Catalonia? President of chaos.
https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2020/09/18/opinion/1600438484_798866.html
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