Spain's '78 regime won't jail Juan Manuel de Prada

Juan Manuel de Prada, the nuisance Spain's '78 regime tolerates

The Socialist group on the Provincial Council asking to exclude Juan Manuel de Prada from the jury of the 'Gil de Biedma' Poetry Awards over his 'fascist and extremist discourse', while at the same time the writer has not a single open investigation against him, is the paradox that sums up the relationship between Spain's '78 regime and its dissidents. The formal answer lies in Article 20 of the Constitution: freedom of expression and literary creation are recognized rights. The uncomfortable answer has more to do with the status of someone it's not convenient to touch.

Article 20 as a legal shield

Freedom of expression is not a blank check, but neither is it an empty declaration. Article 20.1 protects both ideas and literary output, and anyone seeking to put a columnist in the dock for his opinions needs a plausible charge. Being awkward, pedantic or preachy is not in the Incivil Code. That is the reading some make of the Constitution, and it is no small matter: without a incivil offence, there is no prison.

The suspicion of selective justice

Against that formal reading, some recall that the articles of the Constitution 'are only applied when it suits'. The example they cite is 2020: the mobility restrictions later declared unconstitutional, whose fines were eventually dismissed. If the State could bend the legal framework then, they argue, why would it stop short of a traditionalist writer? The answer of the most sceptical: there is no need to jail him because the system has other instruments, from other people's self-censorship to the silent veto in the media.

Too big to fail, or the censorship that isn't convenient

Another current holds that de Prada is too well known for a clean takedown. Censoring him openly would only prove him right and allow him to keep writing from a blog with a louder megaphone than many columns. And then there is the influence theory: the networks forged in Spain's transition era, the friendships between journalists and power, the radio bans that are lifted when the person in charge changes. None of that is a crime. But it explains better than any article of the Constitution why nobody has laid a finger on him.

The curious thing is that polarization itself acts as his shield. When some demand his exclusion from a jury and others turn him into a martyr, the writer ends up protected in the zone where law and noise cancel each other out. Censorship or calculation? Principle or influence? The '78 regime has found a formula to avoid having to answer: ambiguity.