The confession of Luis Bárcenas , the former treasury of the PP sentenced to 29 years in prison for corruption in the Gürtel case, together with the imminent start of the trial for the illegal financing of conservative training, they once again place at the center of public debate one of the darkest political circumstances of the recent Spanish democratic stage.

Bárcenas has sent a letter to the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, which has been investigating his affairs for 11 years and forced his entry into prison for the first time, in which he affirms that during the last seven years he has not said everything he knows about how it was financed your party.

In his new confession, Bárcenas maintains that the PP had used since 1982 the system of accepting donations in black money and paying the party leadership with that fund; that this system was known to all leaders – including Mariano Rajoy, who according to the story destroyed the compromising papers with a shredder; and points,

It is up to justice to verify the veracity of these allegations. The trial that begins on Monday will analyze the existence of a box b in the PP that worked for at least 19 years – and that this newspaper announced in 2013-.

But in this process it will only be judged if in one of those years, 2008, the PP paid with money b a part of the reform works of its headquarters, and if the money used for that payment should have been declared in the corporate tax to the have an illegal origin.

Only Bárcenas and former PP manager Cristóbal Páez will sit on the bench. The two of them managed box b, but the party and some of its leaders were the main beneficiaries. Therefore, it will not be judged whether the PP leadership from 1990 to 2009 collected succulent quarterly bonuses that they never declared to the Treasury because they came from box b.

Nor the performance of the businessmen in question. Even so, the trial will have great symbolic force and the squad of witnesses will be filled with suspects, Rajoy and Aznar among others.

Legal action, of course, is fundamental, but the political dimension of the matter is no less so. The PP has renewed its leadership and the leaders of that dark time are no longer on the command bridge. This is a necessary but not sufficient step.

In the absence of the completion of the judicial journey in all its aspects, there are already enough proven elements – even in a final judgment of the Supreme Court – that reveal the structural nature of the corruption that gnawed at the PP.

Pablo Casado seeks to maintain a distance from that unacceptable past, but he will not achieve it in the proper way as long as he avoids recognizing that it was not a matter of some bad apples, but a systemic rot.

For the good of his own party, and no doubt of Spanish democracy, Married and the new leadership of the PP must at some point have the moral height to assume the transcendental gravity of what happened and condemn it in all its dimensions. The sooner the better.