“The democratic votes cast by thousands of [Spanish citizens] in the Canary Islands are being attacked without any legal basis.” So said former Podemos MP Alberto Rodríguez after he was stripped of his parliamentary seat on October 22. The move came after he was convicted of assaulting a police officer — the dubious result of what was already a highly politicized trial.

Even centrist newspaper El País condemned the “political dimension to the case,” claiming that it “further undermines confidence in the judiciary” and gives “the appearance of a political punishment” for a Podemos MP. The conservative majority in the second chamber of Spain’s Supreme Court convicted Rodríguez despite the lack of any physical or visual evidence of the alleged 2014 assault, instead solely relying on the testimony of the accusing police officer. In their dissenting opinion, the two progressive judges on the court insisted that the evidence was “very far” from sufficient for a guilty verdict and that “it is plausible the officer was wrong in identifying” Rodríguez.

This affair has also detonated a major crisis in the country’s progressive coalition government, after Congress speaker Meritxell Batet — an MP for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) — to disqualify Rodríguez as a MP. Unidas Podemos has now demanded Batet’s resignation, accusing her of “fail[ing] to defend the legislative branch from an unacceptable intervention by the judiciary.” Batet has insisted that she had no choice in carrying out what she saw as the Supreme Court’s sentence. But the Congress’s own legal team insisted that the Court’s ruling had only barred Rodríguez from standing in future elections, during the application of his suspended jail term.