The truth is that we have come out of one scare, that another one is coming. I tell you this because I read these days that there is an operation underway, by two platforms promoted by some of the same people who promoted the late UPyD and the comatose Ciutadans, to set up a centre-left party.
I don’t know what Carrizosa and the long-suffering Cs deputies who still wander through Parliament must think, but I can’t stop thinking about an old joke. A gravedigger is walking through the cemetery with a shovel on his shoulder, when he hears a scratch and a hand emerges from the ground and grabs his leg, moaning: “Help, I’m not dead”. The funeral operator reacts by poking him with the shovel and muttering: “You, what you are buried in badly”. Because the logical question would be: if you already have a party founded and, even with some meager political representation, why do you have to found another exactly the same? Note that the most curious thing is that the role of the undertaker is also assumed by Messrs. Bal and Igea, prominent positions in Ciutadans until they were expelled four days ago.
The founding manifesto of one of the platforms is called La tercera España and quotes Machado’s verses about the “Españolito al que van helar el corazón”. The verse is fine, and Machado’s figure is hardly objectionable. Another thing is the opinion that the republican poet could have had of the political trajectory of those who invoke him and of the backlash that, supposedly in the name of concord, they distribute to the left and the right. Above all because the invectives always go more towards the PSOE, and especially towards the perfidious Pedro Sánchez, than towards the PP. Call me naive, but something tells me that the search for moderation and great consensus does not go well with the hyperbolic virulence that has been a trademark of the house since the days of Rosa Díez and Albert Rivera.
In any case, the idea now seems to be the creation of a “social democratic left” party that gives support to those who feel orphaned in the current blog politics, perhaps forgetting that four days ago (2019) they touched the sky with hands and were about to wrest right-wing hegemony from the PP. In short, that orphanhood is very recent and leftism a bit of an afterthought.
The thing does not stop having its what, because, at least in the environment of Cs, “social democrat” was something very similar to an insult and synonymous with a lack of firmness in convictions. “Social democrat” was the PSC, always ready to dialogue with the pro-independence parties; “social democrat” was Rajoy until he decided to compromise the reputation of the Police in actions with a swagger that still surprises and “social democrat” is Feijóo on alternate days, especially when he passes through Barcelona and starts talking about autonomies and of nationalities recognized in the Constitution. Wow, what a social democrat any tou venpatrias is.
You can even apply the test of the new: so Cs began to expand across the country, the first thing it did was a congress to expel social democracy from its program, the second was to call the coalition of a left-wing “banda” government, and the third to dedicate some adjectives to those who did not share his idea about the unity of Spain that would have earned him sidelong glances even at a Vox convention.
Now they can talk about nostalgia for the “old” PSOE of Felipe González and Guerra, but anyone can remember how little they liked. To a certain extent, they were born against him, against his passivity in the face of nationalism, against the government majorities he achieved with methods very similar to those now used by Sánchez, against what in other latitudes is called political negotiation and here intolerable concessions that endanger the unity of the homeland.
It is the eternal drama of these parties of intellectuals overrepresented in the media: they do not alleviate the politics of blocs and contribute to fragmentation. They only get votes from former PSOE and PP voters and contribute to the cohesion of independence. They also forget a structural thing that Felipe González and Aznar! they were clear at the time: in the absence of absolute majorities it is impossible to govern in Spain without nationalists who, on the other hand, deserve to be listened to with the same respect as any other political option.
From the other platform, Nexo, in the absence of anything better to do, I will follow closely the next adventures.
