The current issue of Letras Libres, entitled ‘The Siege on Justice’, examines attempts by governments to exert control over the judiciary, from recent controversies in Spain and clashes between Trump and the US judiciary, to the populist capture of institutions in Poland and Hungary.
Natalia Velilla begins he article on the delegitimization of Spain’s justice system with a warning from legal scholar Pablo Antonio Gutiérrez Colantuono: ‘small, constant and deliberate attacks’ can gradually hollow out democracy, ‘reducing it to little more than an empty shell’.
In psychological terms, we become ‘desensitized’: attacks on judges may initially raise alarm, but reactions gradually subside as society grows accustomed to ever-higher levels of aggression and institutional disloyalty. For Velilla, Spain is now at ‘a very dangerous stage in the normalization of risk’, riding an ‘illiberal wave’ towards the practices of populist democracies.
Three polls published in July 2026 point to high levels of distrust in the country’s justice system. Their timing is significant, Velilla argues, coinciding with judicial proceedings involving people close to prime minister Pedro Sánchez and reinforcing a broader strategy of ‘casting doubt’ on the judiciary.
But such attacks predate the current PSOE government. From the PP’s talk of ‘police stitch-ups’ during the Gürtel affair to the Catalan independence movement’s portrayal of judges as instruments of political repression, Velilla traces a delegitimization that has become systematic, with talk of ‘lawfare’, ‘Francoist judges’ and a judicial ‘caste’.
Good judge, bad judge? It all depends on who is in the dock. Potential reforms have been buried beneath the ‘noise’ and political mudslinging. And once the seeds of mistrust have been sown, Velilla warns, they are difficult to uproot – and their fruits, political impunity, readily reaped.
Death by a thousand bites
Veteran journalist Elisa Beni talks to Daniel Gascón about her recent book, Cómo matan (a mordiscos) nuestra democracia (‘How they’re killing our democracy, bite by bite’). Beni argues that democratic erosion begins with apparently trivial breaches of convention, which gradually develop into a deeper undermining of democratic practice. Democracy consists not simply in voting every four years, but in the checks, counterweights and conventions that constrain power. Hence her central maxim: in democracy, ‘form is substance’.
Beni traces this erosion through Spain’s institutions, from the politicization of the General Council of the Judiciary – ‘getting the referee on your side’ – to what she sees as the capture of the Constitutional Court and the degradation of the prosecution service.
Her criticism extends beyond institutions to a growing culture of ideological conformity, which she illustrates through the response to laws such as Spain’s trans law. Those who questioned the prevailing orthodoxy, she argues, faced ‘a new inquisition against those of us who refused to accept that biological sex does not exist’.
Yet Beni ends on a cautiously hopeful note, trusting that ‘whoever governs next will have the guts to reverse course and clean up what has become corrupted’. Spain, she argues, is too close to the brink for inaction to remain an option.
Democratic geometry
Foreign correspondent Alejandra Clements traces the delicate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the United States. Washington, DC originally formed a near-perfect diamond of almost 260 square kilometres, and within this diamond Clements draws – with Montesquieu’s permission – a triangle between the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court.
In the America of 2026 and Trump 2.0, however, this triangle has effectively dissolved into a two-sided power struggle. As Congress ‘teeters on the brink of irrelevance’, Clements argues, Trump has strained the seams of the country’s checks and balances, using executive orders with ‘legislative aspirations’ that threaten to turn the Oval Office into a ‘pseudo-Capitol’.
The judiciary has consequently become the principal check on executive power – but its role is ambiguous. Supreme Court rulings have sometimes strengthened presidential authority and sometimes curtailed it, prompting disagreement over whether the Court is ultimately Trump’s ‘check or ally’. Lower courts, too, have pushed back against executive overreach.
For Clements, the judiciary has become the great ‘stress test’ of American democracy. By acting as a constitutional bulwark, judges are putting this ‘democratic geometry’ of checks and balances into practice: preserving the proper relationship between the branches within Washington’s imperfect diamond – and, ultimately, protecting that other imperfect diamond, democracy itself.
Franco’s body
Josu de Miguel takes a wholly different look at how the law can be made to serve political ends – in this case, to settle the fate of a dictator’s body. More than forty years after his death, Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco was exhumed by means of a decreto-ley – a fast-track legal instrument reserved for situations of ‘extraordinary and urgent necessity’. ‘Our treatment of political bodies is also unique, like our Transition’, de Miguel notes.
He first surveys the treatment of political leaders’ bodies across Europe, before offering a sweeping vista of theories of the body politic, from John of Salisbury to Ernst Kantorowicz. In particular, de Miguel contrasts the enduring institution of kingship with the intensely personal – and religiously inflected – authority of Franco’s dictatorship, which could not survive him. In the context of fascism, de Miguel writes, ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ might instead become ‘after the dictator, the deluge’.
In 2018, Sánchez’s government argued that Franco’s continued presence in the Valley of the Fallen prevented the effective implementation of the 2007 Historical Memory Law, using a decreto-ley to exhume and reinter his remains in a family mausoleum. De Miguel is sceptical of the supposed urgency. But while ‘privatizing’ Franco’s body proved achievable, escaping the ‘Francocene’ – Franco’s continuing centrality as a reference point in Spanish political culture – may prove considerably harder.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations