The French writer Paul Valéry said that our most important thoughts are those that contradict our feelings. Imagine belonging to a generation of thought, that of the seventies, which saw the revolutions in Berlin, Berkeley or the Sorbonne, Pope John XXIII, the first secretary of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao in China, the general Charles de Gaulle and then Francois Mitterrand, the shooting stars of Marcuse, the Latin American boom in Hispanic literature, the beatniks, the hippies, the miniskirt and the birth control pill. Imagine growing up in this environment: observing the historical upheavals, while in Spain you live the censorship and the fear of the repression of a regime. Your starting point as a generation is that of a dictatorship and the temptation is to do everything yourself: Western-style stable democracy, the Moncloa Pacts, the 1978 Constitution, and also the main social, political and economic transformations . So it was and it was done well. But there were also sins, such as a “political amnesty” which, as it was called then and is now forgotten, did not cause the desired effects, because it was a “dropper amnesty”. And an unresolved territorial dispute, among many others.
It was a bridging first generation that diligently led an exemplary, albeit incomplete, transition. Committing, yes, a serious mistake: projecting his life into the future as something unparalleled, leaving the rest, his children, as mortals, just for not living their times. Well, they are checking how with surprising naturalness their children, who are parents, come to complete their work. Law of life For this political generation, that of Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, of protean verbosity, capable of moving from the Athenaeum to the hairdresser, from ideas to insult, with an identical animosity, overcoming what has been achieved is lives as a “monstrous confusion”, just like José María Aznar in the 2004 election and Mariano Rajoy in the 2018 motion. And, of course, the more they cling to their thoughts, the more they disconnect from the majority feelings of the country, because Spain is no longer what it was.
Look, there is nothing like the principle of reality: there is no public tide against the amnesty, there is no national rebellion and the square hailed Isabel Díaz Ayuso and not Alberto Núñez Feijóo, candidate for the investiture. Yesterday – you saw it – there were hundreds of people at the PP event in Plaça Felip II against the amnesty, 40,000 according to Police sources. But don’t be fooled, all of them would fit at the Wizink (15,000 people) in two Taburete concerts. The question is why there is no avalanche: in addition to the “Catalonia factor”, which cannot change Spain, but determines it, the generation of democracy and abstentionists are the answer. In the CIS pre-election, among young people who voted for the first time, the PP exceeded the PSOE by almost 3 points, but in the end it was almost 8 points in favor of the socialists. Before the campaign, among those who abstained in 2019, the PP won by more than 4 points, but ended up beating the PSOE (0.7 more points). Even the 6-point advantage of the PP among those who did not remember what they voted for in 2019 was turned in favor of the PSOE by 4 points. He lost everything in the last week, but it could have been a day, an hour or a minute. Such is public affairs today.
The post-electoral CIS is stubborn, like Spain that wants total reunion. And the truth in politics always shines in the end, when everyone is gone. For this reason, if Feijóo is one day president he will speak in Galician like Borja Sémper Basque in Congress, and to be a free politician he will have to be. Like Rajoy in 2008, if Feijóo wants to be prime minister he will have his “National Congress of Valencia” with a despised Aznar, no longer with hair and abs. It is written And as in Plutarch’s parallel lives, he will have to regain his authority by discovering that friendship and patience are pets and not herds. It is also written. It will happen in synchronized Basque and Galician times like Mariano in 2009 which, in his case, will coincide with European ones on June 9, 2024. There, one cycle will end, life or death, and another will begin. Meanwhile, more echoes of another generation will emerge, more critical voices, more feelings that contradict thoughts, because Spain will continue not to be what it was, it is preparing to be what it wants to be.
