(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Las caídas del guindo)

This has been a week of revelations. And surprises. It is often said that a revelation that puts an end to a deception makes one “fall from the cherry tree.”

In Spain many are falling from the same cherry tree permanently, and one gets the impression that hours later they miss the branches and rush to climb back up the tree, once again conveniently deceived, awaiting the next hard knock.

That this fondness for the sigh and the “what a disappointment” or “I would never have expected it” is a specialty of the ridiculousness of the center-right in Spain is already known by everyone.

They have been falling from the cherry tree for 35 years, but no blow diminishes their love of self-deception. But let us go first to a revelation from which hundreds of foreigners who do not know the saying fell from the cherry tree.

The greatest revelation of all, at least the one that may have the most positive consequences for the honest Spaniards who want to end the nightmare of a coup-plotting head of government, occurred in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

And it is the revelation had by the vast majority of the 706 members of the European Parliament from 26 countries and their respective governments, who believed that Pedro Sánchez was a bungling and frivolous social democrat but who, given what circulates today around Europe and the world, asked to be taken as a reasonably acceptable character to keep pulling this carriage, already held together with rusty screws when not pins, that is the European Union.

Suddenly they have understood that what they would have accepted as an ordinary, common and acceptable being governing in Spain is not that, not by a long shot.

He is an extraordinary being in the worst sense of the term, a person one rarely encounters in his intensity of coarseness and perfidy at once, a lying man, without scruples, but above all with an inner violence that cannot promise or portend anything good.

He arrived at his star appearance in Strasbourg with his nerves frayed, because he takes setbacks very badly and his plans to stage a coup d’état without attracting too much attention had blown up in the air.

Spaniards have not only realized that with the amnesty for the criminals of the coup-plotting of 2017 in exchange for seven votes he is perpetrating the destruction of the constitutional regime of 1978.

But moreover many of them have decided that they are going to confront the coup-plotter Pedro Sánchez and make his life impossible wherever they can and whenever they can.

And the coup-plotter will now only be able to resort directly to repression, because the capacity for deception that he has had, much of it to be sure, has run out.

In Strasbourg he arrived nervous, his mask fell off, and he has at last shown his true stony face to the European political and journalistic class that had let itself be deceived so easily.

It had let itself be deceived by the greatest swindler and liar in the history of Spain, first because he is a great swindler and liar.

And second because it is more comfortable not to see the unpleasant truths on the European stage, of which there are plenty, and ignoring them is usually a good recipe for a harmony that always reverts into well-remunerated continuity.

Also because treating well the head of government of a large country like Spain always turns out to be profitable in the kitchen of Brussels, however dreadful the opinion one has of him.

Even more so if, as with Ursula von der Leyen, a relationship of mutual favors has been established that has worked to unheard-of and who-knows-if-fraudulent levels when one asks about the destination of some European funds that have reached Spain without any questioning whatsoever.

We do not know what Von der Leyen really knew about Sánchez before, she who will be, as soon as things improve a little, the next figure to disappear down the drain from the European stage.

Many things are going to happen in Europe in the next six months, no doubt, ahead of the June 9 elections, and what is clear is that some are going to be good too for those of us who believe that there has been no management more catastrophic, freedom-killing and harmful to the interests of Spaniards than the Commission of Ursula von der Leyen.

The other revelation has been to see how easily the PP digests a coup d’état. Multitudes of its adherents have again fallen from their respective cherry trees. “How is it possible?” they said.

The PP spends weeks calling on the population to take to the streets because the homeland is in danger, which it is, on account of the amnesty law that is a coup d’état against the Constitution.

It calls for mobilization and maximum alert against Sánchez, the unworthy coup-plotter, and the PSOE, against the communists and the separatists and the terrorists and the rest of the malefactors.

And the day after directing every possible diatribe at the criminals who want to destroy the democratic regime, it makes a pact precisely with those criminals over all the parliamentary committees.

With which they legitimize the coup-plotters of all the parties implicated in the crime. The Partido Popular makes a pact with the PSOE, with Sumar, with Junts and with Bildu and the PNV and the whole lot of them.

That, of course, and then it goes to Strasbourg and says that what Sánchez and his band are doing with this total dismantling of the institutions and the destruction of Nation and State in agreement with the worst enemies of Spain is intolerable.

It is possible that the omnipresent propaganda against VOX, and also very legitimate convictions, prevent all of them from voting for VOX.

But there are ever more Spaniards of all ideological sectors, some greet it, others regret it, who understand that the PP leadership has entered the path of a “loyal opposition” that amounts to a “satellite opposition” of the socialist power and that it is going to be incapable of getting out of it.

And that this path, which Mariano Rajoy had already set out on, only surprised by the economic catastrophe that defeated Rodríguez Zapatero so as to return placidly to the assigned place, leaving the Soraya-style handbag on his bench, cements and legitimizes the regime without alternation that Sánchez, the separatists and terrorists and the immense international interests that have been in this totalitarian project in Spain for twenty years now are gestating with this coup d’état.

If the coup-plotters of the criminal alliance that Sánchez has forged for his majority manage to get the PP to take on this last great step of the transformation of the regime with the same meek attitude of servitude as all that went before, the whole task of confronting the new regime will fall on a single opposition of conservative forces, today still a minority, defamed, harassed and mistreated in a minority party.

But it would not be the first time that happens. Nor the first time that that minority ends up moving the majority to put an end to the tyranny.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.