Let me take a day off from my vantage point in Berlin, where I have tried to more or less successfully analyze international geopolitics through the “fog of war” (Clausewitz dixit) – the reader will judge.
And in turn, trying to approach the turbulent waters of Spanish politics in this pre-election period, which, as the polls show, could result in a cycle change.
The first thing to note is that a phenomenon that has been all too obvious in European politics for a while has spread to our Iberian Arena as well: in our case, the normalization of far-right parties, Vox.
It’s a phenomenon whose root causes need to be explored in depth, but favored by this kind of new Cold War mentality that has settled on the continent, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I will be told that it is precisely Putin’s Russia that fuels some of these populist movements on social networks.
However, this in no way exempts the ruling parties from their responsibility to neglect citizens’ most pressing concerns, such as housing, health, or the cost of living in many places.
In any case, there is an undeniable fact, that when it comes to voting, citizens are guided more by passion than by programs that no one bothers to read and, moreover, often not even followed.
A former communist leader we will all remember did not get tired of repeating the phrase “programme, program, program”, but he preached in the desert.
To use the great Baruch Spinoza, here, as elsewhere, the affects predominate. love and passions. The strongest and determinant of these is hatred. In our case, “Sánchez’s hatred”.
The character is dehumanized, humiliated, the worst character flaws are attributed to him, he is accused of wanting unlimited power, of being a despot, a liar, a traitor and a “slum”: all this, whatever his politics may have something to criticize rather than objectively criticize.
I hate Sánchez, as well as the radical rejection of what many call his Frankenstein government, a phrase made up by the late Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, a socialist leader, but which has made a fortune in our media.
This reference to the monster created from different body parts, conceived by the fervent imagination of the British writer Mary Shelley, served to disqualify what would elsewhere simply be a coalition government.
It therefore seems difficult to bring together ideologically very diverse parties, such as the Liberals, Greens and Social Democrats in Germany, for example, and this is evidenced by the difficulties that the highly heterogeneous coalition is currently going through. but no one would even think of derogatoryly describing it as the “Frankenstein government”.
A coalition like this requires patience, empathy, negotiation skills and, above all, a willingness to compromise, virtues that are never abundant in a country where hatred often seems to be ingrained.
For example, isn’t it possible to stop ETA terrorism, from constant agitation and because it only seems to yield election results, as if this phenomenon that caused so much suffering had not disappeared long ago?
How can we not remember the historical scene played by the British monarch when he shook hands with Martin McGuinness, one of the military leaders of the time, Deputy Prime Minister of the Government of Northern Ireland, on 27 June 2012? the IRA?