Don’t expect a campaign where ideas and programs are discussed. There are two months of confrontation between the right and the left in all fields, because the Spanish character does not support nuances or doubts. All are dogmatic and exclusive certainties. In his Historia de las dos Españas, Santos Juliá collects a parliament from the progressive deputy Evaristo San Miguel rejecting in Congress that the first Carlist war of 1835 ended in a negotiated peace. The deputy said that “if the war were only one of succession, an arrangement would be possible, but it is based on principles, and since these are incompatible, there is no compromise. It is necessary that the war be to the death… that one party defeats another, so that the vanquished is exterminated forever.
We left a bitter campaign and entered another in which the economy, foreign and defense policy, health or education are not going to be debated. It will be a repetition of accusations between good guys and bad guys with the infamous “go for them” as the battle slogan to get a handful of votes here or there.
This cockfight between politicians does not correspond to a society that is not as ideological as the one its leaders have in mind and that opts for the point of gravity at each moment. The political-media turmoil is more of a diversion than a concern. The voter knows how to make a composition of place and, if he goes to the polls, he does it more based on his interests and his particular situation than on the Manichaeism that he observes in the public debate.
The fall of the Republic was the failure of moderation from the right and from the left. Neither the ideas nor the interests of the adversary were respected. The Spanish drama for a good part of the 20th century was trying to destroy centrality, taking it to extreme positions in the name of progress, beliefs, the unity of the homeland or the class struggle.
In the last half century, with all its tensions, the cainism that has characterized our long history seemed to have been overcome. The spirit of confrontation on all fronts seems to have returned. Ernest Lluch quoted the historian Benedetto Croce when he referred to history as the past that does not pass.
