Riots, Lula, extrapolations

The mobilizations that are taking place around the world (from Bangladesh to Barcelona, passing through Milan, Paris, and Madrid) can evidently have elements in common, starting with the fact that they are mobilizations on the streets of these cities that arise simultaneously, led by young people. But there are also differences that advise against viewing them as parts of the same whole. Here there is everything: protests, revolts, and demonstrations with more or less clear motivations, objectives, and slogans. And then there are also riots, blind and empty vandal attacks that at most create social alarm and chaos, not counting the destruction and looting. They seek to blend in with the other movements, and in fact, this confusion is their main objective.

Sometimes it is good to ask oneself that cui prodest?, who does it benefit? In the case of what happened on Saturday in Barcelona, driven from the networks by a name that is also blind and empty (Blocus, a name that only convenes, without demands or slogans or manifestos or anything), the right and the far-right, both the Spanish and the Catalan ones, have latched onto it with guns and baggage. From the left, it has only been applauded by the clueless or the nostalgic who believe in that idea of going out to burn the streets. But burning the streets can be insurgent or it can be reactionary. Putting in the same bag, for example, the encampments of Plaça Catalunya and the Madrid Sol square and this vandalic attack would be an erroneous extrapolation. Or an interested one. In the middle of the electoral pre-campaign, the right and the far-right are taking advantage of Saturday's riots in Barcelona (and the threat that more will occur next Saturday) to blame their two favorite enemies, Pedro Sánchez and immigrants. They trust that this will excite their electorates, that it will make the pot boil with even more pressure and that this will favor them. Here it is the right-wing parties that are extrapolating, trying to imitate the way in which Marine Le Pen pressures Macron. It has been a long time since Batman Dark Knight, by Frank Miller, was published, a comic also reactionary (and brilliant) that described well the fascination for group violence of certain youth riots that there are still those who confuse with expressions of the soul of the indignant people.

In Brazil and against all odds, Lula da Silva has made an electoral comeback and has won the elections for the fourth time. Once again, making extrapolations with the ongoing electoral process in the Spanish state would be inaccurate and hasty, or demagogic. But apart from the good relationship existing between Sánchez and Lula, and the fact that both have become benchmarks of the global left, there are two certain parallels: the Spanish right is trying to follow the manual of Bolsonaro the father, who managed to take Lula to prison with an intense task of lawfare, or dirty judicial war. The other is the refusal of Bolsonaro the son to accept the electoral results as valid, and his determination to question the entire electoral system before acknowledging defeat. Certain things are indeed the same all over the world.