Of the communication that the President of the Central Government addressed to the public on Wednesday, it was necessary to highlight, beyond the solidarity with the personal feelings that animated it, what it contained calling for a collective reflection on the ways of Spanish politics , from his statement yesterday we must stick, above all, with the appeal to the need for democratic regeneration.
It is true that democracies, including ours, have so far demonstrated a considerable capacity to metabolize the imbalances that polarization has brought, but no one can guarantee us that this capacity is unlimited. In the democracy reputed to be the oldest in the world, the American one, an agonizing party ball was already saved with Biden’s latest victory and we are once again saddened by a possible defeat in November, while the enormous social rift that has opened up in that country is sharpening. And in the next European elections, an eventual change of majorities could seriously put at risk the historic project of European unity, the one with the most civilizing imprint that has ever been known and in which our own democratic design lies.
These truly existential risks for coexistence are nothing but a consequence of a climate fueled by hatred of the adversary, which is the feeling that condenses and agitates democracies today, the rejection of political opponents and minorities, to whom ‘accuses of endangering the social and cultural order, the existing order, the traditional one, what those who experience it believe they have the right to possess.
It is really a perverse war logic and threatens to spread. With the enemy, the only option is to defeat him and the end justifies the means, all, all within reach: personal disqualification, insult, slander, the insidious use of family … every day, at all hours, through all spokespeople. So we see how the enlightened heritage on which coexistence is based is being eroded. What the good teachers taught us, what we learned at home and try to instill in our children, and which is expressed in ideas such as those that must be argued to persuade, must be proven what is accused of, must be willing to assume as our own the requirements for the fulfillment of which we judge others, or the simple personal ethics that ask not to hurt our neighbor.
None of this is new, it is not new in Spanish politics, it is not new as a style of opposition, but now we are getting to know their exasperation.
I sincerely believe that after this call for collective reflection it will be a little more difficult to sneak the crudest, most corrosive material into the public space. And I am sure that the Spanish Government will try with new initiatives to alleviate polarization, and it will do well to do so even if it has little or no faith in the opposition. But this, and since democracy is alternation, the one that aspires to govern in the future, should think about what margin of legitimacy they will have left to claim from the opposition a different behavior to that which they themselves are now exhibiting. But to apply the Kantian ideal, at least for purely utilitarian reasons.
I have always been convinced that restraint exercised by the opposition is as good for democracy as it is for society as a whole. Although, yes, restraint requires, even if it is counterintuitive, courage. And the deployment of a constructive opposition, too.
These last few days precisely on the occasion of my participation in the Catalan elections, I have affirmed, in view of the situation we are living in, the validity of a democracy of respect against a democracy of hatred. I know that the first seems like a pleonasm and the second, an oxymoron, that is, that democracy always needs respect, but the truth is that ours, like others, already coexists with hatred.
Well, even if the phenomenon goes on, and for that reason it continues to spread everywhere, through deep waters whose complex origin we may not yet be able to elucidate, we must do our best, everyone, to report it and reject it when expressed. Hate is incompatible with coexistence, it is the most opposite feeling we can imagine to the ideal, and to the need to share a common destiny that respects everyone’s identity. That’s what I’ve always believed, that’s how I understand President Sánchez’s proposal, and it’s very easy for me to defend it together with Salvador Illa for the cities of Catalonia.
