Watching a ninety-minute football match has become a boring spectacle for a significant part of the viewers, and the younger they get, the more bored they are. We are in the age of immediacy and this marks the way we communicate. It is only worth what attracts attention, and often it is secondary whether it is true or not. Everything must be imagined and experienced almost simultaneously. Emotion always rules over reason. Obviously, politics has also quickly adapted to this situation. More and more, politics is a show. The messages and formats are designed to capture, even if only for a moment, the attention of voters who navigate in the midst of an infinite magma of content, often less tedious than politics.
A good example of this new reality is that governing well and getting to the polls with an acceptable service record does little or nothing to get votes. The election campaign for the July 23 general election has just officially begun and none of the debates have anything to do with the management of the government over the last four years or the achievements or progress it has achieved.
In this legislature, a pandemic has had to be managed and then the economic effects resulting from the war in Ukraine, which contributed to skyrocketing the price of energy and jeopardized the progress of the economy. Pedro Sánchez could boast of some macroeconomic indicators, but even he knows that this is of no interest to anyone. That Spanish GDP growth is above the European Union average, that inflation is more controlled than in the rest of the continent, that energy prices have been contained compared to the countries of the environment or that the number of members of the Social Security has reached maximum figures does not mean any advantage for those who aspire to revalidate the presidency of the Spanish government.
And the same can be said of the Government of Catalonia chaired by Pere Aragonès. With the exit of the Executive Meetings, the noise that set the pace weekly has disappeared from the news landscape. Now that the Government governs, it is less interesting. It has the label of being a minority Government, but with two consecutive approved budgets it continues to push forward with initiatives and proposals. There are frequent reports on new investments that decide to settle in Catalonia, especially in the technological and biomedical fields, the number of unemployed people registers historic lows and measures are repeatedly announced in the fields of education, health, social or security that are reversing the situation of cuts experienced during the hardest years of the crisis that hit us a decade ago. But all this has no electoral value. That governments do more or less what is expected of them does not deserve the recognition of the voters.
However, next to the big indicators there is the reality. And many citizens find it of little use to know that unemployment figures are at a minimum if wages are also at a minimum. And it discourages anyone to see that the price of housing doesn’t stop growing, something that grips the elderly and frustrates the young who dream of being able to emancipate themselves. Structural problems are not addressed because the complexity of the solutions cannot be explained in a tweet or a TikTok video.
The political debate is a slave to the show. It is a constant pulse between good, bad and worse, and all speeches are forged on the basis of presenting the opponent as the enemy. No one knows what the PP candidate is proposing because the aim is to remove Sanchism from Moncloa. It is also not known what the PSOE is proposing because the aim is to block the passage to the right. The campaigns are aimed at generating fear in the voters themselves to mobilize them to protect us from some harm. They are never mobilized to do positive things.
In this pim-pam-pum between reds and blues, we Catalan voters are playing something more on the 23rd than knowing who wins. The disturbing pacts in Valencia and the Balearic Islands leave little room for surprise if the PP and Vox can legislate on the Catalan language, school, culture and public media. They will surely succeed in recomposing the strategy of the pro-independence movement more effectively than the pro-independence people themselves.
