Well, from my point of view, the judges weren’t corrupt or took brives. I do believe that they really though they were being fair. But that is part of the problem. They are so misoginist, that they actually think they are being fair and balanced by sentencing sexual abuse instead of sexual aggression (rape) because in an scenario with 5 big men surrounding one disarmed women with only one exit bloqued by them and in a country were women “disappear” on similar circunstances, they didn’t needed to make the threath more explicit.

And as you can guess, the fact that many judges from Franquism remained have a lot to do with those sexist views.

Political situation in Spain is complex. I think it is in many countries, but each country have their specific issues. In Spain we had a civil war that replaced the legal government of ther republic with a fascist regime. They ruled for 40 years (more or less) and when Franco died, he ordered that he would be replaced by our king (now the emerit king) and a democracy. But a big part of the people who wrote the constitution and organized the first elections were people from that regime. As you can imagine, they set things so most positions in power remain in their hands. That includes judges.

And they also have the support of the Catholic church. So even if new judges came after the democracy, the oppositions to become a judge were organized by the current judges that came from franquism. They chosed the ones who have simmilar ideas. So change is really slow.

And even now, Franquism have a lot of supporters. Spain is a polarized country.

As for our government, while they probably would like to focus the discussion on different things than Catalonia, it is unlikely they succeed, since the way more powerful right wing political parties are focusing on that. Since they have more money, support from the church and control several newspapers and TC channels, that would be central in this elections. As for the government, they have found another more controversial topic: “remove Franco from the fallen valley” and the anti-feminism of the right. So now the discussion is about the law that try to combat violence against women.

As for the right-wingers, I can’t talk about other countries, but in mine they never left. They have always been there since Franquism. They taught their children the same sexist, racist and homophobic values. The only difference now is that they have 3 different right wing political parties to chose from and that 2 of them are more open about their discriminatory policies. They also have the catholic church support. So they are just more emboldened.

On the other hand, those are issues that my country need to address. We need to start thinking about justice for people who suffered through franquism, create tools to address violence to women and children, address homophobia, racism, etc. We are in for a few complicated decades. Wish us luck.