Victoria Rosell and Pablo Iglesias, against lawffare at the Podemos school

Together with Victoria Rosell, the Government delegate against sexist violence, and one of the biggest victims of judicial lawfare by Judge Alba, today in prison, Pablo Iglesias charged this Saturday against the dirty war that his party has suffered throughout of these last years. It was during the Fall School that Podemos celebrates over the weekend. The title of the table “The coups of power: ‘Lawfare’ and ‘mediafare'”, already anticipated a review of the operations hatched against his formation.

Sitting next to the former vice president was Rosell, who finally managed to reverse a maneuver to remove her from politics and which ended with Judge Alba in prison. The emeritus magistrate of the Supreme Court and columnist for elDiario.es, José Antonio Martín Pallín, and the spokesperson for Podemos and former deputy in the Madrid Assembly, Isa Serra, participated in the same act, convicted of attacking the authority in an eviction with the The only proof of the police report, in a sentence that the leaders of Podemos consider one more proof of the judicial war against the party and its main leaders.

Rosell, who was Podemos’s bet to occupy a position in the General Council of the Judiciary if the PSOE and the PP finally closed an agreement that Feijóo frustrated at the last second, warned that they cannot be classified as “low intensity” when resulted in his losing the seat and that of Alberto Rodríguez for Tenerife. “I resigned and Alberto was fired,” said the current Government delegate against sexist violence. Rosell cited other examples of that war “in the setbacks that the Government of Ada Colau in Barcelona suffered in the contentious field due to its water remunicipalization policies.

It was Iglesias, however, who received the greatest cheers from the audience. “The only ones who defend liberal democracy and the rule of law when things get difficult are the communists,” he defended, after a brief review of the history of the Spanish transition. The terrorism of ETA, the Catalan independence movement and the judicial front against Podemos have been, according to him, the three fundamental cases in which the “patriotic elites” decided to abdicate the rules of the democratic game against threats to the status quo.

The cataract of lawsuits against Podemos, filed almost entirely or in the process of being filed, have been the latest manifestation of this phenomenon, according to Iglesias, because the formation embodies the true will for political change. It is about “killing Podemos” to favor a “left like Carrillo’s,” said Iglesias, who did not make explicit references to the United Left, but to the “allies who would never have dreamed” of entering the government. Podemos thus has the “will of the State and power” that other formations would lack, and for this reason it strives to obtain support and cadres in spaces such as the police or the armed forces, as well as “alliances in economic power”. Also for this reason he points to journalists such as the director of Al Rojo Vivo, Antonio García Ferreras, whom he explicitly mentioned among others that he considers complicit in the judicial war, unlike the other left, the one tolerated by the elite. The decision to oppose NATO’s growing involvement in the Ukraine war would be another manifestation of this will to power. In reference to the last chapter of the PP’s refusal to renew the General Council of the Judiciary, the solution would be to “legally end” the veto power of the Popular Party, but not by an eventual mediation role of the king, since his figure symbolizes “the non-democratic origin” of the political system.

The fiery tone of Iglesias followed the interventions of Martín Pallín, who made a historical review of the judicial war from its origins, which he placed in the decision of the US Supreme Court to disavow the electoral recount that would have prevented the electoral victory of George W. Bush in 2000. In the 21st century, the “modern paradigm” of this judicial war is the coup in Bolivia in 2019, he stated. The emeritus magistrate, formerly a prosecutor, unequivocally accused Judge Manuel García-Castellón, instructor of several cases filed against Podemos, of “prevaricating” and who suffers from “psychopathology” regarding training, as he ironically described.

If Isa Serra charged against the “judges who prevaricate”, the “police that abuse their power” and the media “that lie”, Victoria Rosell recalled that in order for her initial accusation not to be dissolved in a short time, the contest was necessary not only of the prevaricating judge Salvador Alba, but of others who continued with the case with extreme zeal despite the weakness of the evidence. Only when the recordings that pointed to a plot against her became known did the tables turn, did she criticize her. To put an end to ‘lawfare’ as a tool of political harassment, it is necessary in the first instance the collective resistance of those affected and, at the legislative level, “rethink access to the judicial career” so that the judiciary is democratized. Her reluctance to do so is what explains her rejection of her admission to the CGPJ, in her opinion. “I know what I want and I know what they don’t want me to do,” she added.

Warning to “the domesticated left”

The ideological struggle “with calories and proteins”, and not the passivity of the “domesticated” left, should be the path to follow for Podemos in the immediate future, according to the prescription of Pablo Iglesias, former secretary general of the formation, today an analyst of media on various platforms. In a speech that began in an academic tone and ended with the intensity of a rally, Iglesias inflamed the public in the auditorium of the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid, where the autumn university of Madrid is being held this weekend. purple formation.