Next Thursday, the 15th, the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Artur Mas, will testify as a defendant in relation to the judicial process being pursued in the Superior Court of Catalonia for disobeying the Constitutional Court. The date coincides with the 75th anniversary of the execution of Lluís Companys. It is unclear whether the choice of that specific day is a coincidence or the result of a conscious decision by the investigating judge.

What does not seem to be a coincidence is the validity of Article 330.4 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, which allows half of the magistrates of the Civil and Criminal Chamber of each Superior Court of Justice to be appointed from a shortlist proposed by the respective regional parliament. This is the provision that was used to appoint the magistrate in charge of the procedure against Mas in the Catalan Superior Court. It is worth noting that the proposal for this appointment was pushed forward by CiU, the party of the now-indicted individual.

The language of Cervantes, still a co-official language in Catalonia, is rich in aphorisms, and one very appropriate for this occasion is that “no one can be judge and party” or “don’t set a fox to guard the henhouse.”

Article 330.4 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary is a provision contrary to Article 117 of the Constitution, which proclaims the independence of judges. With the state and regional legislative power controlling the appointment of judges directly or indirectly (through the General Council of the Judiciary), it can be said that our country has certain gaps in its Rule of Law.

The indictment against Mas concerns three crimes: serious disobedience committed by public authorities (Article 410.1 of the Penal Code), perversion of justice (Article 404), and embezzlement of public funds (Article 433). We were surprised to hear the “most honorable” defendant say, “legally I did not disobey, politically what happened was a democratic rebellion against the Spanish State: I set up the ballot boxes.”

The testimonies given on July 13 and 30 at the headquarters of the TSJ of Catalonia have revealed the same social fracture that existed in the Basque Country in the 1980s and 90s, where many remain silent or look the other way, others shout praises to Casanova, Companys, and Pujol, and a few outcasts dare to tell the truth before the investigator, in a room decorated with the red and yellow flag.

Very few school principals in Catalonia, despite the pressures received, refused to hand over the keys so that the so-called “participatory process” of 9-N, suspended by the Constitutional Court, could take place in those schools. They have borne the brunt of the social blackmail that the religion of nationalism imposes on its infidels.

I hope and wish that Artur Mas will tell us the truth on the 15th and clarify the confirmed pressures that teachers suffered to hand over their schools and place the ballot boxes prohibited by the Constitutional Court in them. I hope and wish that the investigator will be guided only by legality because any judicial system that does not function independently makes the rest of the citizens who are subject to it prisoners of its inefficiency. We eagerly await to see if, after a possible disqualification from holding public office, Mas will decide to stay in Catalonia or self-exile to Liechtenstein.

It is evident that Spain has much at stake in the challenge to the Rule of Law led by the President of Catalonia, Artur Mas. It seems unthinkable that Spain could lose this battle, but we should draw some conclusions to avoid similar situations in the future.

Any Spaniard might think that this duel could be lost by our country simply due to non-appearance or, rather, due to the neglect of duties by the national political parties, parties that are supposed to represent the general interest.

In this neglect of duties, both PP and PSOE stand out equally. However, it is an undeniable merit of zapaterismo to have brought back the two Spains, reopening an old wound that we thought had healed as a result of the agreement between political forces during the Transition.

We cannot understand ‘zapaterismo’ as an accidental phenomenon but as the result of bringing the prejudices of the elitist, oligarchic, and endogamous Spanish bureaucracy into the political sphere, specifically, the university caste from which Zapatero himself came.

This caste does not serve the citizenry since its purpose and existence are exclusively oriented towards inoculating students with a venom against private enterprise and wealth generation, uprooting any possibility of developing personal attitudes towards entrepreneurship and promoting the desire to become civil servants.

To whom does the civil servant account for their work? Or, in the university sphere, who measures or evaluates the outcome of the teaching task? Spain, like other Western societies, must carefully study the functioning of its bureaucracy to transform it into a tool that serves society.

It seems we have not learned that when meritocracy is removed from the horizon and unfair egalitarianism punishes the best, blocking any possibility of proportional benefit to effort and risk, we end up in the situation of abject misery to which communism led us.

It is the risk of failure and uncertainty (inherent in the private world) that create the right environment for progress. The fact that something can go wrong scares us and leads us to do everything in our power to prevent that adverse outcome. Effort, reflection, and creativity arise in contexts of uncertainty, and the fact that things can change activates us to survive.

However, the bureaucratic and endogamous design of the university (see the system for selecting professors, the internal promotion system, funding and evaluation system, its limited interaction with the business world…) has immobilized its functioning, hindered its dynamism, and distanced its members from the real world, turning them into the social agents who feel the most animosity towards changing the status quo. It is no surprise that we do not have leading universities, as they live in a parallel, static, and immovable universe where meritocracy and the creation of viable solutions to real problems have been relegated to the corner of oblivion.

It is necessary to analyze the results of 30 years of public service in democracy to implement changes that generate benefits for society, turning teaching into a driver of national economic development since it is from this activity that behaviors generating an entrepreneurial attitude and mindset, the genesis of wealth creation, emerge.

Undoubtedly, the university bureaucratic caste will not allow the indoctrination of our young people to stop, as it would mean the end of the outdated left that still roams the classrooms. But without that change, the conflict of the two Spains will remain ad eternum.