“Idealism does not exist. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. “All that damn symbolism people talk about is just nonsense.” Ernest Hemingway, absolute master of narrative ellipsis, described in this way the spirit with which a writer should approach writing. He did so in a letter addressed in 1952 to Bernard Berenson, an astute Lithuanian art expert who became rich selling supposedly Renaissance paintings to the patricians of North American high society.
What according to the author of Farewell to Arms was valid for literature – the best books are those that manage to turn fiction into the only reality – also applies to Spanish politics, anchored in the war (without quarter) of a legislature where Polarization between the right and the left travels incessantly from Madrid to the periphery and vice versa.
Sugar, according to doctors, is a sweet poison that, in certain doses, harms health. The same can be said about southern politics, which for five years has been revolving around a star –Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla– whose radiance is beginning to wear out the mirror in which it is reflected. The president of the Board, whom the rains of this Holy Week have miraculously saved from the wear and tear of having to manage a chronic drought, is experiencing what is possibly the beginning of the end of his unusual popular enchantment.
His baraka has begun to lose intensity without the San Telmo Palace wanting to acknowledge it. Their opposition to the unstable parliamentary majority in Congress – the PSOE and Sumar need the independentists not to step out of line at any moment – ??does not end up influencing Madrid, unlike what happens with the vicissitudes of Basque politics or Catalan. Its ability to condition Moncloa is discreet, if not scarce.
The president of the Board has not achieved, with the exception of the latest regional and municipal electoral calls, a greater presence of political order in the capital of Spain. Andalusia does not yet weigh enough on the national agenda and the president of the PP-A, although stability is more than guaranteed until 2026, knows that his rhetoric neither conditions the central government nor limits the insistent (fiscal) aspirations of the independence movement. .
The political situation in the South is analogous to the years of the conquest of self-government, but Andalusia – until now – is not knowing how to act as a counterweight to the asymmetric territorial drive. In parallel, Moreno Bonilla’s personal rise seems to have stalled. His team does not stand out for showing much capacity for initiative – it limits itself to administering the legacy of the former socialist governments – and the Board has been operating for five years like an airplane without an engine, gliding between the currents of apathy and propaganda.
The immense amount of power that the PP has achieved in the South of Spain has not translated into substantive changes or categorical reforms. Continuity is the supreme roadmap. In fact, the only important issue on the Quirinale agenda is to maintain at all costs the spell that in 2022 gave the popular their first – and only – absolute majority in the South.
The problem, both in life and in politics, is that nothing lasts forever, although it may seem otherwise, and even the absence of a real opposition, which is one of the factors that explain the dominance of the Andalusian right’s escabechismo, It does not guarantee total hegemony. The Andalusian PP is beginning to show symptoms of triumphant inbreeding: its decisions, previously balanced, show a partisan conception of autonomous institutions that is not very different from that which, at the time and for decades, characterized the socialists.
Examples: Moreno Bonilla has raised his salary without parliamentary debate and has improved the salaries of 271 senior officials; He cultivates his own networks of faithful executors, where he feeds a part of the sociological right; It practices a selection of managerial profiles that does not match its promises to professionalize the administration, whose spending volume continues to be huge, and it begins to not hide that the true priority of the southern right, just as happens in the Community of Madrid, are the policies that transfer economic resources from the public to the private sphere.
After five years, the management of the president of the Board presents a fairly discreet balance. It is true that so far he has not made many mistakes – it is one of the advantages of quietism – and that the erosion of his image is still low, but the strategy of governing without irritating the left by making decisions of the right is increasingly presenting more difficulties.
The Andalusian PP, sheltered behind a conciliatory speech, has made decisions that guide regional policy in the same direction as the regional government of Madrid: the private sector. San Telmo modified the urban planning legislation in the previous legislature, which it shared with Cs. Now it plans to address changes in the Territorial Planning law. The logic is to encourage the construction sector in the heat of tourism development.
The PP resists establishing the collection of a tourist tax in the capitals and feeds intensive agricultural operations – which increase water consumption – regardless of their legal situation. Its biggest conflict is in the Ministry of Health, where the friendly discourse of maintaining public health does not correspond to the diversion of budget funds in favor of private clinics, owned by insurance companies.
The former Deputy Minister of Health, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, has just signed up for Asisa, the usual sponsor of the PP’s political events in Andalusia, three months after leaving the Board and despite the law on incompatibilities for public positions. It is not the only case: similar controversies affected the general director of Fisheries and the managing director of Tourism and Sports of the Board. The opposition demands an investigation into health contracts made during the pandemic.
The colossal waiting lists – for diagnostic tests and surgical interventions – continue to exceed all maximum legal healthcare deadlines. Moreno Bonilla is beginning to have disturbing management fronts, although the latest electoral polls, for the moment, do not indicate a significant deterioration in his image, which is his great political heritage.
There are those who predict an imminent government crisis in San Telmo – it would be the first in these five years – given the atony in which the Andalusian executive is installed. If it happens, it wouldn’t fix much either: the hegemony of the right in the South is supported by the figure of the president.
This asset is also its great weakness. The Andalusian PP is not exactly a team, but a court with a monarch and his valets. There is no valid number or number two. There are aides-de-camp, but San Telmo lacks an heir. The PP still reigns supremely in Andalusia but, five years after coming to power, it is still terrified of governing. He limits himself to posing, as if the play in which he stars were a (symbolic) one-act piece.
