Turbulent times
The phrase has become the catch-all term in the reports on Leonor's investiture and the imminent one of Sánchez
Juan Carlos Viloria
Malaga
Friday, 3 November 2023, 17:48
The information overload we've been experiencing since June 23 reached its peak in these last days of October. This coincided with both Prime Minister ... Sánchez acquiescing to Carles Puigdemont's will and Princess Leonor pledging allegiance to the Constitution. We witnessed a solemn act of respect and submission to the supreme law, personified by the heir, contrasted with a subjective interpretation of the law and electoral matters, driven solely by the desire to secure his presidency for the coming years, allowing him to do what he swore he would never do.
The heir submits herself to the sovereignty of the people enshrined in the Constitution during a time of political and moral relativism unlike any seen in the past forty years. This relativism allows those in power to adjust the law to the exigencies of partisan politics. It enables them to claim, without rigour, that dozens of rulings by the Constitutional Court validate the constitutionality of amnesty, or even more boldly, that amnesty itself is constitutional. In essence, the end justifies all means. A political party can take ownership of amnesty and trade it for votes and favours, either out of "necessity" or "for Spain." What difference does it make?
With her just turned 18 years, the Princess irreversibly enters the national political climate, an atmosphere charged with electricity, tension, and polarisation. Thanks to her comprehensive education, she knows that, since the Constitution of Cadiz, the Crown she will embody in the future is not a source of power but a symbol, and that sovereignty resides in the nation of citizens enshrined in the Constitution. She is also aware that a democracy, represented in the form of a constitutional monarchy, relies on the three branches of government, their autonomy, and the division of functions. But with populism as a childhood illness of the relativism that has found fertile ground in Spain, it has become almost impossible to distinguish the right from the opportunistic, the moral from the necessary, real history from selective memory.
The phrase "turbulent times", which has become the catch-all term in the reports on Leonor's investiture and the imminent one of Sánchez, is justified. Because no one can predict the extent to which alternative law, the manipulation of institutions, the arrogance of the victors and the indignation of the humiliated can be used. A country where a four-minute ovation for the King and the heir coincides with the anti-system gestures of half of the partners of the next president is destined to walk on a knife edge in the coming times.
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