I don’t know if you have the same feeling, but since the electoral campaign has started, they only explain to me strategies that have to do with the mobilization of the electorate. That muddled thing when you only care that your people go to the polls, as if there were your own votes instead of citizens who decide.
And I do not say this because suffrage is not important, on the contrary! The vote is, in fact, the main instrument of participation as stated in article 68 of our Constitution. Nevertheless, and as I argued in another recent article, I am surprised that the agenda of democratic regeneration, of improving transparency and participation, has been relegated to sleep the sleep of the righteous.
It is surely explained by the pendulum movement of history and that after an outbreak with the 15-M and movements like those of “Envolta el Congrés”, the same institutions have been vaccinated and parapeted. It is also influenced by the fact that the strategy was not very intelligent, and that it had more trivialization than democratic reformism. We confuse democracy with decisionism, participation with venting, transparency with exhibitionism and the sum of outrages as a proxy for a country project. They believed that the way we choose the Eurovision winner was more democratic than the institutional framework of a mature system like ours.
But making a mistake in the solution is not the same as ignoring the diagnosis. The democracies around us, in difficulty, do work to improve representation using digitization and data traceability. On their own institutional pages, they launch actions such as the electronic petition to the more than classic British House of Commons; or in the Austrian Parliament, which with 50,000 supporters can be defended in the Chamber, or the right of petition reinforced in the unsuspecting German Bundestag, to mention only some of the most relevant ones. We, on the other hand, once the threat has been resolved, we allow only 24 deputies and 15 senators to comply with the obligation – yes, obligation – established by the Code of Conduct of the General Courts to publish their meetings with the representatives of the lobbies or pressure groups, to give just one example taken from the 2022 Annual Report prepared by the Conflicts of Interest Office of the Spanish Parliament.
The center of gravity of politics in recent years has been concentrated in the Executive and in the parties and has moved away from the Congress of Deputies, which is where national sovereignty resides. The autonomous and municipal elections have meant, among others, the end of the new politics and, after 23-J, we will surely return to a scheme similar to that of the first democratic elections of 1977: two big parties (UCD and PSOE) and two from minorities at the extremes (AP and PCE). But we will be confused if we think that 2023 is 1977 and we continue to shamelessly grant the monopoly of the general interest to the executive and the parties in a society that is more complex, more plural, less aligned. The demise of the new policy may mean the end of irritation (still lucky), but we’d be wrong if it also meant the end of the challenge of improving representation. We will wake up on July 24th, and the elephant will still be in the room and we will wonder later how we were so blind not to see it. They will tell you to vote. do it They won’t tell you what to think. Ignore them.
