Lurkers

Those of us just old enough to re­mem­ber Dick Van Dyke doing his ex­cru­ci­at­ing im­i­ta­tion of an Eng­lish ac­cent in ’Mary Pop­pins’ (1964) might also just re­mem­ber the coup d’état which took place in Greece three years after that cheery lit­tle film. Amaz­ingly, this ’rev­o­lu­tion to save the na­tion’ – as the coup plot­ters de­cided to call it – took most Eu­ro­pean in­tel­li­gence ser­vices com­pletely by sur­prise, con­vinced as they were that after the end of the Greek civil war (be­tween roy­al­ists and Com­mu­nists) in 1949, Greece had set­tled down and be­come a per­ma­nent, com­mon-or-gar­den par­lia­men­tary democ­racy. All these spies had turned a blind eye (or were sim­ply blind) to the ex­is­tence of a far-right Greek ’se­cret state’ which had been func­tion­ing since 1949 and in­volved el­e­ments of the mil­i­tary to­gether with like-minded folk in the ju­di­ciary and the media, and which fi­nally strode into the po­lit­i­cal lime­light after an 18 year wait in the wings.

There are par­al­lels with the King­dom of Spain. Ever since the fail­ure of that coun­try’s 1981 coup d’état, Eu­rope suc­cumbed to the com­fort­ing be­lief that a de­mo­c­ra­tic con­sti­tu­tional monar­chy had been con­sol­i­dated for good. And yet since 1981, Spain, too, has had a ’se­cret state’ lin­ger­ing off­stage. Ac­cord­ing to Javier Pérez Royo, pro­fes­sor of law at the Uni­ver­sity of Seville, the coro­n­avirus plague has been seized upon by ul­tra­con­ser­v­a­tive el­e­ments in the ju­di­ciary (such as the judge Car­men Rodríguez-Medel) and the Civil Guard (such as Colonel Pérez de los Cobos) to desta­bilise the cur­rent gov­ern­ment: De los Cobos pre­pared a doc­tored re­port for Rodríguez-Medel claim­ing that the real cul­prit be­hind the coro­n­avirus out­break was a gov­ern­ment-sanc­tioned fem­i­nist demon­stra­tion in Madrid on March 8 (a re­port that was kept se­cret from the Min­is­ter of the In­te­rior). The judge used this spe­cious as­sess­ment to launch pro­ceed­ings against var­i­ous mem­bers of the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion. At the same time, the wealth­i­est areas of Madrid and sev­eral other Span­ish cities saw a sur­real se­ries of protests, in which peo­ple wav­ing golf clubs and loud­hail­ing slo­gans from their chauf­feur dri­ven cars lam­basted Prime Min­is­ter Pedro Sánchez’s han­dling of Covid-19. Ac­cord­ing to Pérez-Royo: ’there’s a coali­tion of many sec­tors as well as the Pop­u­lar party and Vox, in­volv­ing judges, Civil Guards, sec­tors of the church, pos­si­bly some busi­ness peo­ple’ who want to see the Span­ish So­cial­ist Party, its left-wing coali­tion part­ner Podemos, and its oc­ca­sional al­lies (which in­clude some Basque and Cata­lan pro-indy par­ties) out of power, if pos­si­ble be­fore the EU starts dis­trib­ut­ing its much-cov­eted post-Covid largesse. Other to­kens of this ’vel­vet coup’ are the at­tempt by Vox to bar 29 MPs from the Span­ish par­lia­ment (all from pro-indy par­ties or Podemos) be­cause they swore an oath to the Con­sti­tu­tion using (legal) caveats; the re­cent rul­ing of the Span­ish Supreme Court that no un­of­fi­cial ban­ners (LGBTI signs, Cata­lan pro-indy flags, etc.) can be hung from of­fi­cial build­ings; an even more re­cent Supreme Court rul­ing that the three Cata­lan-speak­ing au­tonomous gov­ern­ments in Spain (Cat­alo­nia, Balearics and Va­len­cia) must ad­dress each other of­fi­cially in Span­ish only; the at­tempt on the part of the Na­tional Court’s pros­e­cu­tors to con­vict the for­mer head of the Cata­lan po­lice of re­bel­lion or at least sedi­tion for his sup­posed mis­han­dling of the 2017 ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence; and the in­ex­plic­a­bly end­less de­lays of the Con­sti­tu­tional Court when it comes to re­view­ing the ap­peals for the re­lease of the Cata­lan po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers de­spite re­peated calls from the UN’s spe­cial rap­por­teur on Human Rights that Spain do so (to­gether with sim­i­lar re­quests from Amnesty and HRW). All of this nox­ious string-pulling – and more – has been tak­ing place slap bang in the mid­dle of the worst world­wide pan­demic since the 1918 Span­ish ’flu, and I would bet my bot­tom euro that not one for­eign power (or jour­nal­ist) has no­ticed a thing. Viruses may be in­vis­i­ble to the naked eye, but that doesn’t stop them from mak­ing per­fect smoke­screens. Es­pe­cially for those ded­i­cated to con­coct­ing a dis­creeter, be­hind-the-scenes ver­sion of what the Greek colonels – in their day, as men­tioned ear­lier – dubbed a ’rev­o­lu­tion to save the na­tion’.