A mother's love (Orriols' word)

Anyone who has children – I have three daughters – knows what it is to love unconditionally. Even a character as unsympathetic to others as Donald Trump demonstrates daily the importance of family. He has not hesitated to favor sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and young people with positions and contracts. In our country, the cases involving part of the Pujol family precipitated the downfall of a true statesman who did not deserve the end he had. Zapatero could not find a better digital marketing expert than his daughters. In the court and capital, José María Aznar, when he could, did: and his daughter's husband became stuffed with lobbying for Endesa or Telefónica. In France, in 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy's son, 23 years old and without finishing his studies, was proposed to preside over EPAD, the public body that manages La Défense, the financial district of Paris. And so on, as many as you wish.Ripoll, which is not Barcelona, nor Madrid, nor Washington nor Paris, has also shown us how far a mother's love (and the discredit of politics!) can go. I can only describe as endearing the performance by Sílvia Orriols adorning herself with a local police t-shirt to explain, before the council, that working as a temporary in Ripoll's security forces had been her daughter's lifelong dream, a dream that was now coming true. A mother cannot destroy such a precise and well-articulated vocational horizon: local police, temporary contract, Ripoll. She cannot do it even if it means not sleeping, drenched in anxiety for the girl's safety, an adolescent on patrol through the urban jungle.

The same Silvia has let us know that the town does not lack "delinquents, terrorists and drunks". I was moved when I heard her say, proudly, with her head held high, that Guinadell had obtained number one "solely on her merits", far superior to those of the other candidates.A mother's or father's love, however, should not cloud our judgment. In politics, family love justifies nothing. No matter how much she loves her daughters, what Sílvia Orriols has done is unacceptable, indefensible. Her inflammatory rhetoric against abuses by public administration and clientelistic networks – one of her political identity markers – has turned out to be smoke and mirrors: empty words.

It is known, however, that messianic leaders, like her or like Trump, play in another league and can do whatever they want: even stand in the middle of a city, shoot the first person they meet and believe (rightly) that they will not lose a single vote. These are the unfortunate times we live in.The issue is not just nepotism, but the distance between what leaders promise to fight and what they end up doing when they have power. Plugging in a daughter or son is just a symptom. The devalued political word is the underlying illness.Orriols promised, in 2023, that he would never make the same mistakes as his predecessors in the mayoralty of Ripoll; in particular, combining the position with a seat in Parliament. Said and (not) done: months later he was heading the lists of Aliança Catalana. In this way, he entered through the main door into the club of the poets of dead words. Carles Puigdemont insisted, in 2016, that his would be a transitional mandate, temporary, of a maximum of eighteen months, and that in no case would he be a candidate for the presidency again: he was the head of the list for Junts in 2017, 2021, and 2024. In the PSOE primaries of 2014, Pedro Sánchez, who will lead the socialist list for the third time in the next elections, argued for limiting mandates to two legislatures. Alberto Núñez Feijóo has also strived to be admitted to this (perhaps not so) select club: in 2016 he promised that this would be his last presidency of the Xunta, but in 2020 he ran again and opted for a fourth term.One of the reasons why political disaffection is growing is that party leaders often say one thing and do another. If they think people don't notice, they are mistaken. In politics, words should weigh double what they weigh. When they weigh half, people ignore them and vote with their hearts; or conclude – with some reason – that all politicians are the same; or, simply, they get fed up and take a healthy distance from public affairs. Unfortunately, the problem is not a lack of speeches: it is an excess of words that are born dead.