Only seven days ago the face to face between Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, but it seems like seven months ago. So many pages have been filled, so many opinions have been expressed, that we have been saturated, with the feeling that Sánchez not only lost the debate, but also missed an opportunity. And also the leader of the PP was witty when he also joked about the four days and the 800 advisors with whom he had prepared the debate. Which was not true either, but in the face to face truth was the first victim. But it was about winning to advance in the polls or to turn them around. At whatever price.
On the sets of San Sebastián de los Reyes, a debate almost identical to Felipe González and José María Aznar was also held thirty years ago, where the socialist candidate was also the favorite and the final result could not have been worse for him. Aznar, like Feijóo, muddied what he could, but politics is more like boxing than ballet and you don’t have to have studied at the Sorbonne to know that. Then, at the end of the broadcast, the president greeted Antonio Asensio in his office, where Txiki Benegas encouraged González, telling him that he had won the face-off to the businessman’s surprise. Something similar happened after the debate on Monday, where nobody told Sánchez that he had done really badly. María Jesús Montero, who was desperate in the room of the president’s advisers, limited herself to commenting that it is very difficult to debate when someone lies without blinking and people have seen that. The next morning, in Vilnius, Sánchez claimed to be satisfied with his intervention.
It’s often hard to defend against attacks, but harder to defend against praise. Flattery is an evil of politics. Shakespeare wrote a tragedy about it, Timon of Athens, and similarly addressed the subject in King Lear, Othello, and Richard III. On one occasion I heard Manuel Valls, former Prime Minister of France, state that politicians do not need to hear from their collaborators what they already know, but need to know what they do not intuit. The Roman historian Tacitus was even more emphatic two thousand years ago: “The worst kind of enemy is that of sycophants.”
