The world is more polarized than ever, but this year, hundreds of millions of people will go to the polls to elect their representatives. Democracy is the most sustainable of the fatigues because it does not solve the problems definitively but corrects them and postpones them until new formulas are found as a result of the pact or the transaction.
No one would have suspected four years ago, for example, that Greece would be considered the most successful country in 2023 by The Economist magazine. The reasons are not ideological but political which had a lot to do with reality. Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis, an old-fashioned conservative, took the country from the far-left Syriza that was on the verge of kicking Greece out of the euro, to one of the economies which have grown more in the Union.
It has reduced tensions with neighboring Turkey, managed to deal with the catastrophic consequences of the earthquake and has revolutionized the way Greeks interact with the State through a digitalization program that has reached the vast majority of citizens.
But the attrition of power is taking its toll on Mitsotakis and when elections are held, he will probably not have, according to polls, a sufficient majority to continue governing without the support of minority groups who are now attacking him hard from the opposition .
The year begins, therefore, with the weakness of governments that have parliamentary majorities but do not connect with the society they serve. It is not new, but today there continues to be a great disparity between rulers and ruled, between discourses and needs.
The progressive and conservative elites discuss and debate with each other about societies that are in their imaginations but that do not represent the country that exists in the concerns of humans. On the extreme right, it is not fought with rhetoric but with policies that make societies fairer, more respectful, more prosperous and less unequal.
The media political circuit cannot presume to know all the answers to the crises of the liquid society, of consumers with little time to have their own judgment, without taking the precaution of finding out the causes of discontent. It is not wise to govern for half the country thinking that those who have not voted for the government in turn are all wrong and do not deserve due attention.
The fragility of democracies demands more bridges and fewer walls, more knowledge of reality and less rhetoric about ideal worlds. Every time someone tries to create a new country or a new man, I don’t know whether to be scared or smile. Societies exist and so do countries. What needs to be done is to govern well, as Josep M. Bricall says with ironic scepticism.
The administration of the future with all the artificial intelligence and its derivatives will have to be done with rigor, solvency, decency and justice in order to aspire to build human-sized societies, imperfect and vulnerable, which can be improved by more responsible leaders .
Zygmunt Bauman confessed at the end of his days that modernity was born under the sign of an unprecedented confidence: we can achieve it and, therefore, we will achieve it, that is, we can re-found the human condition and turn it into something better than it has been so far. It was the triumphalist motto of Barack Obama in 2008 with that “Yes, we can”, so suggestive and so human, that his successor was none other than Donald Trump, the most dystopian of the American presidents who could repeat the mandate this year. Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos was a confused copy of that Obama rallying cry.
It is not wise to make predictions about 2024 that we are now starting. I want to stay with an optimistic view, that of the glass half full, despite so many prophets of doom who preach from ignorance or ignorance.
Europe and the Western world will move forward and overcome the uncertainties that can be seen in the short and medium distance. As long as the fear of accepting, dialoguing and dealing with the other is lost to find common ground. There are no single or irreversible solutions to the complexity of things. It only requires respect for the opponent with whom it is possible to find common ground to solve the common problems that always have reasonable solutions and accepted by the large majorities of the centrality.
