I don’t know if you have the same feeling, but since the electoral pre-campaign began, they only tell me about strategies that have to do with the mobilization of the electorate. This uncouth thing when you only care that yours go to the polls, as if there were their own votes instead of citizens who decide.
And I am not saying this because suffrage is not important, on the contrary! Voting is, in fact, the main instrument of participation as stated in article 68 of our Constitution. However, and as I have already argued in another recent article, I am amazed that the agenda for democratic regeneration, for improving transparency and participation, has been relegated to sleeping the sleep of the just.
Surely it is explained by the pendulum movement of history and that after an outbreak with 15-M and movements such as those of Surround the Congress, the institutions themselves have been vaccinated and sheltered. It also influences how unintelligent the strategy was, which had more of trivialization than of democratic reformism.
We confuse democracy with decisiveness, participation with ease, transparency with exhibitionism and the sum of indignation as a proxy for a country project. They believed that the way we chose the Eurovision winner was more democratic than the institutional framework of a mature system like ours.
But failing in the solution is not the same as ignoring the diagnosis. Democracies around us, in difficulties, do work to improve representation using digitization and data traceability. On their institutional pages they launch actions such as the electronic petition in 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 to petition strengthened in the little suspicious German Bundestag, just to cite some of the most relevant.
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 in the Code of Conduct of the Cortes Generales to publish their meetings with representatives of lobbies or groups of pressure, to give a single example taken from the 2022 Annual Report, prepared by the Office of Conflicts of Interest 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 regional and municipal elections have meant, among other things, 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 in 1977: two large parties (UCD and PSOE) and two minorities at its extremes (AP and PCE). But we will be confused if we believe that 2023 is 1977 and we continue shamelessly granting 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 politics may mean the end of the irritation (thank goodness), but we would be wrong if it also meant the end of the challenge to improve representation.
We will wake up on July 24, 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 they think. ignore them.
