The painful one performance that the former Minister of the Interior and Justice of the Generalitat Valenciana, Salomé Pradas, offered a few days ago before the judge who is investigating the disaster of October 29 in the Valencian Community –as David Miró says– a stark exposition of an entire way of understanding politics. Needless to say, none of the tears shed by the former president (also a former senator) before the court were directed at the 228 victims of the DANA. No: Salomé Pradas was crying for herself, for her bad luck. She was crying out of grief and surely also out of rage, wondering how this could have happened to her.
There's a common type that the Spanish political and administrative system (including Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Valencian Community) has nurtured over the last four decades. This is the person entrusted with the task of occupying a mid- or high-ranking position in the public administration, who doesn't see it as a responsibility, but as a reward. A reward received for what reason? Well, a reward that comes as a result of belonging to a political party. If one is in the right party and does good (which means imitating the monkeys of Gibraltar: feeling nothing, seeing nothing, speaking nothing), sooner or later the reward will come, which will be a minor position or a larger one, depending on each person's ability to choose company, places, and times, to keep secrets, to keep secrets.
The governments of autonomous communities, but also those of town councils, provincial councils, regional councils, island councils, town councils and various supra-municipal bodies, without forgetting, of course, high-level state politics, have produced thousands of people who have reached the peak of their professional careers when they have held one or more public offices representing a political party. They sometimes have a complete and unashamed lack of knowledge about the subject they are supposed to manage: this Salomé Pradas is a cynic who went to recite to the judge what the PP had been told to say, but at the same time she wasn't lacking in sincerity when it was transmitted to "the experts." Within this vision of public life, one is in charge to enjoy it and to experience the things that come with it, from participating in parliamentary sessions and meetings with the press (which she has changed) to immersion in a social life that, for these people, is the expression of social success: openings, conferences, festivals, dinners, awards ceremonies. To take care of the thankless part of the day-to-day work, the actual work itself, there are "the technicians," a gray, anonymous mass of people who, for Salomés Pradas everywhere, have the obligation to pull the chestnuts out of the fire while the politician limits himself to carrying out his "representative" work. So what a disappointment and commitment, if suddenly 228 people die and, as it happens, you end up being held accountable?
