Gritoria
Politics is the struggle for power. And in a democracy, it's governed by the principle of a simple majority, which grants a parliamentary majority. It's the civilized staging of what we call the class struggle, with the right/left dichotomy as the system's axis, often with a tendency towards caricature, the demonization of the adversary, and rhetoric that operates on the logic of "us versus them," turning the rival into an enemy. It's a brawl that transcends ideas, proposals, and decisions, often devolving, on each side, into expressions more akin to the psychopathology of petty differences.
The result is that political debate is degraded by a dynamic in which the criteria of truth and falsehood are conspicuously absent, the disqualification—and even criminalization—of the adversary takes precedence over any project or proposal, and decisions are made that are difficult to understand from a rational perspective because they lack any justification. And thus, the prestige of politics declines. Only the most devoted to each cause are applauded, relationships become unnecessarily strained, and the public loses trust.
Right now, the examples are classic. And so are their consequences. Feijóo has taken the criminalization of Pedro Sánchez to such an extreme that not even his own people know what he wants. Ideas and proposals are not part of his script, and consequently, some of his voters are turning to Abascal and Vox, who, with more doctrine and less dependence on the adversary, capitalize on the discontent of a public that feels neglected and abandoned, and crudely construct a portrait of those responsible for their problems.
In Catalonia, it is Junts, completely disoriented after the Process, searching for a space it has partly lost itself, that confuses the collective interest with its own, playing cat and mouse in the Catalan and Spanish Parliaments, rejecting the gains of the patriotic path, even though it knows perfectly well that in an all-or-nothing scenario, nothing almost always wins. This is the tactical profile chosen with the intention of presenting themselves as the true representatives of the Catalans against those who accumulate pact after pact. And it is surprising in the case of Junts, because its most brilliant moments—and those with the longest tenure in power here and influence in Madrid—were precisely with the fish in the Pujol bucket. This need to "now I'm going to make a move, now I'm going to stop" may satisfy its leadership, which thus disguises its impotence to go further, but for the moment it only makes them smaller. Politics is not only about overacting, but also about taking concrete action. Sometimes, trying to appear authentic only ends up watering the crops of the far right. Orriols has been reaping the rewards for some time now.
