In the final assessment of a legislature, each government accumulates lights and shadows, successes and mistakes, although in the minds of those who formed this or that executive, the magical thought of not having caused significant damage seems to persist. And if there was, it was in spite of himself, a necessary evil. It’s about simple survival to get to the next election campaign with a renewed smile. The fact that, sometimes, the impact of a law or a political decision cannot be measured until much later, when the architects are no longer in office, plays in its favor. For example, the Iraq war, an invasion that constituted a serious undermining of international law and the legitimacy of the fragile UN, is still compared to other conflicts by the aggressors with the accusation of have double standards
Be that as it may, when the final balance is taken, the crisis scenarios outweigh everything else. Even when the wrong path was taken, what ends up tipping the scales one way or the other is the reaction to the mistake, the assumption of responsibility and the evaluation of the modus operandi, especially when they are driven by the ethical responsibility to rectify damage, whether in a pandemic, a financial collapse or a case of corruption.
The reports, interviews and documentaries that have been produced on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the 11-M jihadist attacks on the trains in Madrid return to us a country mired in pain, united in the face of adversity and bewilderment. In these circumstances, it was necessary to be able to believe in the political class regardless of its color. It was to some extent logical that in the first moments the initial reaction was to point to ETA, although those who had a close relationship with its bloody history, such as some judges, police or journalists, soon began to have doubts , an intuition that was confirmed when the first tests were carried out.
Even so, when we now see archive images of the first crisis cabinet convened by Aznar and only people from his party are recognized, without the presence of security forces or intelligence, or the emergency services, it remains clearly something more was at stake than national security or the lives of victims in emergency operating rooms. The outgoing president believed, until that fateful morning, that he had left everything resolved and well tied up for his successor. Any option that did not involve ETA threatened his legacy with the shadow of the Azores photo hovering over it.
If we now follow the chronology of those days before the elections, listening to the experiences of those involved and the pressures they suffered, with the reminder of the calls from the presidency to the directors of the main media, it seems clear that Spain was a advantaged student of what is now a sign of our times: alternative facts, conspiracy theories and polarization. It was also the seed of “they don’t represent us”, neo-revengeism and the erosion of the legitimacy of the rule of law with the permanent accusation of the formation of “illegitimate” governments. As the then director of ABC, José Antonio Zarzalejos, summed up in Jordi Évole’s program, in those days “the democratic heart of Spain was broken”.
Time did not completely soften the judgment of Aznar, who years later expressed that “neither (they were) in remote deserts nor in distant mountains”, referring to the intellectual authors of 11-M, as if it was the title of a bad novel, despite the fact that judge Gómez Bermúdez reiterated over time that these claims were untenable.
After twenty years, there has therefore remained, in addition to the pain of broken lives, a distortion of the political space that is even perceptible in the current mandate. Partisan politicization has turned this space into a non-place, in the sense given to it by the anthropologist Marc Augé, the opposite of a meeting place where common references are woven and constructed. And there is no coexistence worthy of this name without a common narrative, at least in terms of the main lines of events as crucial as this one. “It has had no cost. No one has apologized. If you can lie with two hundred dead, you open the door to any lie”, pointed out journalist Cruz Morcillo last Sunday night. The loyalists of that slogan remained at the head of their positions or obtained new ones.
