Justice intervening where political figures are concerned may give rise to one of two situations: a juridical conflict with or without political consequences; a political conflict which at a certain point takes on a juridical component. Only this latter case becomes what I would call a judicialization of politics: the use of a court of law to influence the unfolding of a political conflict for which no political solution appears to be possible or desirable. In the former situation, the juridical conflict is at the root of the political conflict, its consequence; in the latter situation, the reverse is true. In which of the two situations are we to place the criminal complaint lodged against the Prime Minister by the lawyer acting for Carlos Silvino ("Bibi") in the Casa Pia [child abuse] case and the resulting mobilization of the Public Prosecutor? I believe we are dealing here with the judicialization of politics. What then is the political conflict triggering the juridical conflict? In principle, a government with an overall majority in Parliament is well-placed to solve political conflicts in political terms. Only thus will it not be part of either of two situations: when there are internal divisions within the party in power; or when the Opposition parties feel pressured to seek early elections, whether to invert political decisions that have already been made, or to prevent others from being made. The two situations may exist on a complementary plane and make each other possible so as to produce converging political objectives.
Events might lead us to believe that the Prime Minister is being the target of character assassination. Hypothetically, political decisions that have already been made are at stake. The stakes the State still has in financial capital and in strategic industries grant it some autonomy to decide which fractions of capital to favour. It is not a case of autonomy with regard to global capital in general, but only as regards its different practices, which, all being globalized, present themselves as being either nationalist, others as Iberian, etc. The fractions which are not regarded favourably have enough political, and media, clout to allow them to react and try to invert the situation. This is precisely where one finds the main factor in the threat to the freedom of journalists in  developed democratic societies. Decision-making on what to publish, when and how to publish, and internal censorship and self-censorship systems are monitored in the interests of the economic aims of the groups which control the major media outlets. Curiously enough, this factor has been completely left out in recent debates on the freedom of journalists. In these cases, it is of great moment that not all of the players in the political-juridical conflict should be aware of their ultimate goals. This is especially so as, when courts become involved, good management of their participation demands that the main conflict be disguised by the secondary conflict. In its turn, the judicial system has a variable capacity to withstand the judicialization of politics. In the situation under analysis, that capacity tends to be large because what it has to ascertain is on the fringes and remote with regard to the heart of the political conflict. Converting what is on the fringes and remote to an issue which is central and close by can already be said to be an autonomous effect of political-mass media action.