Spanish judge shuts down satirical magazine

The website of El Jueves, a popular weekly magazine in Spain, was codemned by a judge, Juan del Olmo, to shut down yesterday.

The closure was instructed following a complaint about a cartoon depicting Felipe de Borbón, the potencial successor of the current king of Spain, having sex with his wife in the front page of its latest weekly issue.

El Jueves is a satirical weekly targeting younger readers than Le Canard enchaîné or Private Eye. El Jueves specializes in political humour and social satire profusely spiced up with sexual material with a trademark gross style that, more often than not, is cheap and boring.

The Spanish establishment has however gone too far in their censorship of the magazine; as I write this, the front page is flying across Internet and the blogosphere. The translation of what the prince is saying to his sexual partner is: “Do you realize if you get pregnant, this will be the closest to real work I’ve ever done?”. It stresses out the perception of the royal family as a parasitic and expensive institution that is returning very little to the Spanish society.

The judge’s blunder is vindicated by even clumsier demands by the fiscal Miguel Ángel Carballo. His boss, the self-mystifyed top Spanish fiscal, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, has endored this decision by describing the publication as “obscene” and “abusing” (sic).

The authors of the cartoon, the cartoonist Guillermo and script writer Manel Fontdevilla, dismiss the heavy-handed action as clumsy and back firing since its reach is explosively growing as a direct consequence of the judicial intervention.

The cartoon illustrates a recent Government promise of 2,500 € for each born child. The royal couple have two baby daughters. The pregnancies of the princess were matter of national interest in the Spanish public life and media.

Spaniards know of the control that the royal family and the establisment impose on the media. The sexual and financial scandals of the family are carefully filtered out before they reach the commercial media. Their British counterparts can’t help however being exposed every now and then. Both royal families are celebrated in their respective countries as an endless source of fun and ridicule. This action by the Spanish judge Del Olmo might come as an awakening about the tight and increasingly exposed grip on traditional media.