Equivocal Ecuador
President Marga Prohens and her executive can congratulate themselves on reaching the midpoint of the legislative session having approved two consecutive budget laws: no easy feat in times of speculative politics. Speculative politics, to put it bluntly, works the same as land and housing speculation: prices are inflated to create a bubble that bears no relation to reality, and which benefits a few while harming the general interest. When politics isn't speculative, approving budgets is usually done through parliamentary debates that can be intense but also measured: everyone (including the opposition) understands that the government needs a budget to govern, and therefore strives for its approval to be relatively smooth. Doing otherwise is understood (used to be understood) as a form of obstructionism.
In times of speculative politics, like the present, governments have no guarantee that they will be able to pass their budgets. They must sweat it out, as they say, and that means making concessions to their governing partners, who will then display the agreements they have obtained (or wrested, as they also say, to add drama) as trophies for their expert negotiating skills. The agreements will then be fulfilled or not, depending on the government's bargaining skills and how obligated its partners are to the government's actions, etc. In a word, speculative politics is about how to make people pay inflated political prices, and also how to escape paying them, whether fairly or not so fairly or not at all.
President Marga Prohens and her team have a problem: the political prices for their budget laws are set by the nationalist far-right Vox. She and her colleagues can, naturally, resort to the manual for twisting words and actions and pretend that depending on the far right is just as bad as depending on the far left and the blackmail of the Catalan coup plotters. But they themselves know that if they do this, they will be lying, because the truth is that there is no far left in Spain, nor are there coup plotters in Catalonia. Instead, what does exist, and is alive, is the far right. They know this so well in the PP that they even have a significant following within their own party.
The other side has followed and continues to follow its own paths, which for the moment have yielded two relevant political projects: first, Ciutadans, now liquidated. And now, Vox. As in real estate scams, or as with certain bank cards, Vox offers parliamentary support in exchange for interest or exorbitant prices. Relaunching the offensive against the Catalan language and public education, removing the Balearic Islands' own language from healthcare and other areas of public service, deregulating construction and failing to protect the environment to the absurd extremes established by the newly approved Land Acquisition Law, eliminating or cutting social spending, persecuting and (precisely to shield the offensive against Catalan in other, unrelated laws) are, as can be seen, exaggeratedly high political prices. These are measures that threaten the general interest and satisfy only a minority of fanatics and obfuscated individuals, who, as their final contribution to public debate, have proposed deporting eight million people from Spain.
These partners don't bear comparison with any other political force, and in fact, they have no place within democracy. Unless, as President Prohens stated in her midterm review, reaching agreements with the far right didn't mean any compromise, because there is complete agreement between the PP and Vox. If so, everything is understood, and at least we should be grateful for their openness.