The demand
And now, suddenly, elections in Spain. It seems that we will have to go to vote at the end of November, and all because the Madrid government has gotten its act together late and poorly regarding the housing issue, showing the electorate, however, that perhaps there was a bit of political will at the same time that now the right (especially the Catalan one) can be blamed for the failure of some dubious measures that may not work at all.
Because the housing problem is more cultural than economic in a society that has become generationally accustomed to owning its own home forever, revaluing it as a poisoned inheritance. We now live in this society poisoned everywhere, and where everything is falling apart, especially when it rains more than it should due to the crazed climate. Spanish socialism will campaign with the old anti-fascist adage, and will want to disguise the new national-populist right with all the attributes that could now be more frightening than ever: speculation, sexist violence, passivity in the face of climate change, etc. For a Catalanist, everything is lost.
The PSOE is just as responsible, or even more responsible than the right wing for the country we live in. It has governed for more years and has been able to do the things we know must be done, but which it does not want to do due to interests and ties, cowardice and corruption, such as those that have even led ministers of the current government to prison.
But the right will come and everything will be worse, they tell us, because even if it is difficult we can conceive of a country even more disastrous and governed by emptier and more deceitful puppets. Pedro Sánchez has proven to be a phenomenal surfer, nothing more. Someone who knew how to steer the ship while the entire crew was drowning or killing each other or had to settle for surviving in exile. He has triumphed at the expense of everyone else's failure. Now the Catalans exiled by the process will return and the chaos will become even more interesting: these were the first to transform politics into a permanent exercise in illusionism, into an infinite sleight of hand and lies, which always trusts that any night the sun can rise and then we will do “what must be done”. This has been christened as ‘processism’, and perhaps it has been the great lesson that Catalanism has given to the Spanish, also as a recipe for triumph: politics must above all be a juggling act, or one more entertainment in the society of the spectacle, a show that wraps up the voters because it turns them into characters in a drama that goes nowhere because more than a collective project it is a puppet show, a farce and a sublimation of impotence.
The problem is that power can no longer, and that we vote for characters who make us believe they can improve something, when this is proving more dubious every day that passes, and at the same time it is one of the pillars on which the anti-democratic movement is built, which asks that everything be fixed by force, by decree or at the point of a bayonet, as has been done all our lives in authoritarian countries. Democratic politics has been replacing the capacity to transform reality with the spectacular representation of that capacity. And this impotence terrifically fuels the authoritarian demand. We will vote.
