Good interview by Carlos Alsina with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on Onda Cero. Questions with intention, documented, that try to contain the torrential rhetoric of the former president. Alsina does not hide that he does not agree with the mutant criteria of the current PSOE. Zapatero argues respectfully, trusting that we listeners will have forgotten why he lost the election after introducing some elements of falsely progressive frivolity into Spanish politics. When they comment on the political situation in Catalonia, Alsina is belligerent – ??perhaps too much so – and Zapatero clings to the idea of ??dialogue and legitimate decisions as an antidote to the poison of unilateralism, immobility and tension. With the eloquence of an untrained juggler, he claims the Statute effort as a starting point and affirms that amnesty is compatible with socialist principles while self-determination is not.

It is a phrase that has been repeated a lot these days. Literally, it questions the viability of the negotiation and pushes us towards a possible electoral repetition. Aware that uncertainty is the only irrefutable truth on the planet, Zapatero adds – with a finality that I don’t know whether to interpret with hope or panic – that if you have to change your mind, then you change it. And quoting British journalist Martin Wolf, he says that “he who does not change his mind does not think.” When a politician quotes a journalist, be careful. The interview includes details of endogamy that add morbidity to the pettiness that surrounds the desire for prominence of those who, like Zapatero and so many others, do not resign themselves to losing their capacity for media influence among those who, for better or worse, do not consider that Not changing your mind is necessarily equivalent to not thinking.

We must be terrible so that the interview with Zapatero is an oasis in an informatively disastrous morning, with expansive massacres and, in a dimension of proximity, a circulatory collapse (train delays, failure of alternative bus lines, chaos on the roads and an insane circulation to get in and out of Barcelona) that invites you to breathe deeply, to listen to the radio and, if you can’t stand what is explained there, to console yourself in the most unworthy way: thinking that in other places on the planet (“we don’t have water, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have medicine,” explains a Doctors Without Borders spokesperson from Gaza) have real reasons to confirm that the world is ending. We are left with the moral doubt of asking ourselves if, in the current circumstances, enjoying the joy and pleasures within our reach is a sin, a betrayal or, as the propaganda pulpits of both sides transmit, an ignominy. The year 2023, however, is not over yet, and invites us to recover that maxim attributed to Santiago Rusiñol: “There are years in which it would be better not to get out of bed.”