According to current legislation, municipal elections will be held across Spain on the fourth Sunday of May. Elections will also be held in some Autonomous Communities, including Aragon, on the same day. At the end of the year, at an undetermined date, we will vote to renew the Congress and Senate, our national parliament throughout Spain. We’ve been talking about elections for a long time, too much for many citizens, almost in a permanent campaign, so it’s a little lazy to write about it, but its importance should drive us all to contribute to our grain of sand. trying to improve what has cost us so much effort.
- Democracy. That’s a great word, we all want to be branded as true democrats, even those who aren’t. This form of government did not come from heaven, it was the practice that first gradually changed the traditions in political administration in England. And fight, almost always, because these changes are often not well received by those in power. In Spain, we had a brief democratic experience in the Second Republic, because the Restoration only appeared and it was with the current constitution that we entered the elite club of democratic countries. If we pay attention to the classifications made by international organizations, we are not so bad because we are better than the USA, France or Japan in terms of democracy. Having said that, we must insist on a basic idea: we must fight every day to preserve what we have and improve as much as possible, so we must not underestimate that we cannot get any worse, there are parties like VOX. , who wants. And in Europe the winds are not blowing in the right direction because Hungary, Poland and Italy already have far-right governments, and in France we were told that the next president will be Marine Le Pen.
- elections. They are basic, if not the only thing. There is no democracy without elections, but its existence does not mean that everything is over. And we shouldn’t complain that we have to vote too many, never too many. The world’s most developed countries, those belonging to the European Union, have a large number of choices that give citizens the option to change government at different levels: local, autonomous (state in federal), national (federal), European. And the higher the education level, the more selective we can vote in each election, forcing parties to be more careful in their messages. Research shows that not many voters do this, but it’s confirming that there are more and more.
- Noisy. It is one of the main problems we have to face. Democracy, by definition, is a system that requires citizens, potential voters, to have a high level of knowledge of the options in question. The media plays a huge role in shaping the opinions of all of us. And there are lots of things that are good depending on how you look at it. The advent of social networks added a distortion factor to consider. They lie to us, it’s evidence, and the out-of-court agreement that FOX’s owner reached to avoid embarrassment of a criminal conviction proves it. There are in the USA, but we also have these applications. It makes us laugh or sad to see the daily covers of some Spanish conservative media on paper. And some political parties abuse this possibility. Not to mention television, where entertainment programs for housewives (as they’ve said before) or retirees are propaganda machines that abuse the lies of unscrupulous commentators. There is an opinion, but it is sold as information. And what to say about networks, because the anonymity of the identity of the senders of some messages allows them to lie or insult without drawing any conclusions. And, of course, parties with highly qualified advisors who explain to candidates where the hunting ground for votes will go and convince them that noise is more beneficial than confrontational etiquette. The scene that Podemos, a government partner, lives through with the “yes is yes only” law is the paradigm of what I just wrote.
All this noise is very harmful and unscrupulous politicians know very well how to take advantage of it. For me, this mess leads decent citizens to headaches and sometimes abstinence. To make a constructive recommendation, it should be possible to use the publicly funded media, especially radio and television, to broadcast programs that spread democratic values through educated debate. Yes, I know they are very boring, but there are other media based on lies and insults for entertainment.