That new politics of prodigiously muscled young brains that dared to turn activism into an apparatus is dissolving like a sugar cube in coffee. Inés Arrimadas and Alberto Garzón resign, both answered, ridiculed, hated, also lost in their road map despite their worth. And signs of relief can be seen on their faces, which acquire that serenity that the absence of obligations causes. I have always been interested in losers, those who one day vanish accepting that no one will miss them, without a doubt a rite of maturity for any narcissistic personality.
Quite the opposite happens with Macarena Olona, ​​who feels more necessary than ever to combat the bug of ism: from felipismo to sanchismo, passing through aznarismo, zapaterismo and marianismo. His party project is eager to combat bipartisanship, which is back but never gone, like sailor-striped T-shirts. And she chooses a gerund –walking–, always so dangerous in a headline, to name her occurrence. But where is an increasingly single and polarized society headed together?
In the nineties, when the psychosis of cloning in the form of Dolly the sheep plagued us and the human resources departments were pure smoke, some bosses said with salacious eyes that “everyone is important but nobody is essential.” They scared And if any hint of interesting leadership appeared, they would kill it, because what mattered was maintaining the mess of privilege. I think now of everything I wrote about this so-called new politics, and how quickly it has gotten old.
Words like change or regeneration, which filled our mouths, today sound outdated as an illusion. The left seems like a poorly chopped and acid fruit salad, in need of modernity, while the right is already rubbing its hands and its leader announces that he does not know English. His voters would rather not know. But the aroma of victory disinhibits like alcohol.
In Madrid, where I write, politics is not far from reality, but has settled on the market stalls, among the chicken drumsticks and quail eggs. “Catalan is not spoken here,†a neighbor tells me at the chicken shop, after hearing me on the phone. The spell is broken. After 26 years of living in Madrid, this is the first hostility I’ve heard about my Polish.
And it is that the taxi driver, the waiter and the pharmacist are overjoyed by Ayuso (not Feijóo, the real candidate). They look excited just like new parents. Ayuso has known how to sell spark and challenge with his abrupt cockiness, and that attractiveness that many left-wing voters recognize with a small mouth.
The same person who, on the contrary, has penalized Sánchez so much – not so outside of Spain, where crosses are made before a president with the air of an actor who, in addition, speaks good English – well, here, the beauty is still suspect .
Populism is not just a matter of commentators and speech writers, it is in the air we breathe, it is preached on TikTok and it simplifies the complexity of our world every day, offering us strong emotions instead of solid ideas. It is not only the left that has lost the culture war, but also the new politics. “To bread, bread, and to wine, wine”, claims the square. They want Spanish cuisine. The usual prevails in a neo-clientelistic policy, no matter how much it sells an ideal of freedom as false as a luisvi from the top blanket.
