goodbye to the apocalypse

The government won. He argumentatively overwhelmed his censors. Their parliamentary alliance was fortified. This certificate was issued yesterday by Cuca Gamarra (PP). Perifrastically, but in duplicate. By saying that the motion is not “condemning failure” to the current legislature, but “will generate the opposite effect.” And regretting that the “decaying government” has obtained “a truce.” So, goodbye to the conceit of apocalypse. And it is that the badly insulted sanchismo has dismantled the argument of the opposition. He has exhibited a powerful machine in the debate. He has welded internal fractures. It has built a common electoral proposal framework. And it has strengthened the division of the rights. Although all this, with caution: neither definitively, nor irreversibly, nor erga omnesbefore everyone.

Lacking joint and solid alternative proposals, the argumentative arsenal of the right becomes unbalanced, eroded and tends to amortize itself. The unequivocal insistence on the recent setbacks and blunders of the government (frictions in the progressive coalition, disasters of the law of only yes is yes, rhetorical baroqueness of the junior partner) has limits. When he does not incorporate even a hint of condescension to his verifiable successes (economic data, pension reform, EU support in energy and social changes…), and when he spells destructive criticism as Miss Rottenmeier-type jeremyic disavowal, he causes fatigue before the trite. Hypertrophying an alleged “apotheosis of mismanagement” by the Government, she probably alienates segments of that “moderate majority” of which she claims to be a centurion. Although the emperor is absent, strolling through embassies, like his predecessor Mariano Rajoy, he went out drinking after losing another vote of no confidence. What curse did the leaders of that party incubate to face them?

That would have been different if the coalition’s relentless machinery had failed: something previously not out of the question given its internal environmental tension. The doubles match played by Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz was able to generate surprise (instead of fatigue), by covering different angles: a president and a vice president; A Man and a Woman; a socialist and a leftist (and from a communist tradition, like the candidate!). And solidity: both claimed the economic (candidate’s specialty) and social results of government action. One captured the duality between this and the previous conservative management in the face of similar crises, “social democracy” versus “neoliberalism,” he said: there are two opposing solutions, solidarity or austerity. The other vindicated the Constitution as the mandatory and master wall of the welfare state and its recovery (labor reform, IMV, SMI…), something more beautiful (and sedative) in those who come from the left of the left.

This is how they welded internal fissures, settled or softened some citizen concerns (very serious) and comforted their followers. So that the accusation of being “one of the most chaotic, cainitas and unstable governments” of the ineffable and orphan Gamarra crashed before a wall of data: three years of consecutive budgets; 200 reformist laws, some with errors, the most of structural ambition; social peace on divisive issues; and support from the European Union, with an Executive with a conservative majority, for his main projects.

The double day closed with the dispersion of the right, despite their common core and their absence of a known alternative project: the candidate’s proposals were sparse, curious (Gibraltar, coal); retrograde (criminalization of immigration, objectification of women only as birth agents); and the right one, to reform the electoral law, is not for the reason given (sterilizing the nationalists), but to remove the excessive power of the party leadership. Was the Armata Brancaleone. Vox voted for him, but did not even applaud him. And the candidate scolded his sponsors on the essential issue of his climate denialism. The PP abstained, collapsed into irrelevance and contempt for an initiative contemplated in the Constitution, although executed in a crazy way. And he tried hard not to irritate the ultras, how much centrism. The good Inés Arrimadas, shadow of Ciudadanos, made a mistake in everything: she criticized the Absentee for not leading the motion, when she is still expected to do so in Catalonia when she won; and he overwhelmed Vox and the candidate for “questioning the Spanish nation”, defending that it is a “nation of nations”, an obvious success by Ramón Tamames. Who nailed it to the accessory, even if it annoys Sánchez: the government’s speeches are long, long, stony. It’s something.