The first session of the trial against David Sánchez, brother of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, proceeded slowly. David Sánchez arrived at the Audiencia de Badajoz, where he is being tried for the alleged crimes of influence peddling and malfeasance, at 9:40 in the morning. He got out of the car, put on his blazer, and entered calmly into the interior of the Palace of Justice.

When the trial for the Kitchen operation started almost two months ago, there was doubt in the National Court about whether the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior during Mariano Rajoy’s government – with Jorge Fernández Díaz and Francisco Martínez in it – would end up stabbing each other to avoid being tagged with the “X” of the parapolice plot, financed with reserved funds, to steal compromising information for the Popular Party whose treasurer was Luis Bárcenas. With the extremely high-voltage confrontation they both protagonized during the investigation as a precedent, it did not seem far-fetched that they would go into hand-to-hand combat with a every man for himself attitude. But yesterday, that idea vanished: there was a non-aggression pact.

It is about “toppling a government, not at the polls but with other tricks,” warned Minister Óscar Puente yesterday, in the face of the flood of legal cases pressuring Pedro Sánchez. “The PSOE will not tolerate it, we will not bow to anyone’s attempts to disturb our democracy through methods that are not democratic,” warned the Minister of Transport from Congress.