That new policy of prodigiously muscular young brains who dared to turn activism into a device dissolved like a lump of sugar in coffee. Inés Arrimadas and Alberto Garzón resign, both contested, ridiculed, hated, also lost in the road map despite their value. And signs of relief can be seen on their faces, which acquire that serenity caused by the lack of obligations. I’ve always been interested in losers, those who one day fade away accepting that no one will miss them, without a doubt a coming of age rite for any narcissistic personality.
The opposite happens with Macarena Olona, ​​who feels more necessary than ever to combat the malaise of the ism: from Felipism to Sanchism, passing through Aznarism, Zapaterism and Marianism. His party project is eager to combat bipartisanship, which is being worn again, even though it never left, like sailor-striped shirts. And he chooses a gerund – walking –, always so dangerous in a headline, to name his occurrence. But where is an increasingly single and polarized society heading together?
In the nineties, when the psychosis of cloning in the form of Dolly the sheep was whipping us and the human resources departments were pure smoke, some scumbags said with a salacious look that “everyone is important but no one is essential”. They wanted to scare. And if any sign of interesting leadership appeared, they loaded it, because what mattered was maintaining the disorder of privilege. I think now of everything I wrote about that so-called new policy, and how quickly it has gotten old.
Words like change or regeneration, which filled our mouths, sound thunderous to us today like illusion. The left looks like a badly torn and sour Macedonia, in need of modernity, while the right is already wringing its hands and its leader announces that he does not know English. His voters would rather not know. But the aroma of victory disinhibits like alcohol.
In Madrid, where I write, politics is not far from reality, but has taken place on the market stalls, among the chicken legs and quail eggs. “Catalan is not spoken here”, a neighbor tells me in the chicken shop, after hearing me speak on the phone. The spell is broken. After 26 years of living in Madrid, this is the first hostility I feel about my Polish.
And the fact is that the taxi driver, the waiter and the pharmacist are exultant with Ayuso (not with Feijóo, the real candidate). They look excited as new parents. Ayuso has been able to sell strength and defiance with his abrupt boasting, and that appeal that many left-wing voters recognize with a small mouth.
The same thing that, on the contrary, has penalized Sánchez so much – not so outside Spain, where they make crosses in front of a president with the air of an actor who, moreover, speaks good English – since, here, beauty still looks suspicious
Populism is not just a matter of talk shows and speech writers, it is in the air we breathe, it is preached on TikTok and it simplifies the complexity of our world day by day by offering us strong emotions instead of solid ideas. It is not only the left that has lost the cultural war, but also the new politics. “To bread, bread, and to wine, wine”, claims the square. They want Spanish cuisine. The same as always prevails in a neo-clientele policy, no matter how much it sells an ideal of freedom as false as a Louisville manta top.
