We have reached the climax, the collective orgasm of total disaster. After weeks, months, and years of news about successive and respective cases affecting the two major Spanish parties, we have reached the peak of the scandal with the publication of the report by the Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard (UCO), on the commissions allegedly received and shared by the magnificent trio Koldo-Ábalos-Cerdá.
The media compete in the dissemination of emails and audio recordings—coincidentally recorded and casually used without shame—of a vulgarity and rudeness that only increase the general feeling of democratic shame among citizens. Are these the people who run the country? Is this what those who command and control the major political forces of the State are like? Is this what current Spanish (and Catalan) socialism, supposedly progressive and explicitly committed to the "regeneration" of our degraded and obsolete democratic system, is like?
Is paying commissions to politicians or public officials the usual way large companies awarded public works contracts in Spain and/or Catalonia operate? Is the amount of systematic bribes just one more of the many that should be included in the cost analysis of public works? Why do the news only talk about the corrupt and never about the corruptors? Does the Market and Competition Commission intend to intervene in the obvious oligopoly of large companies that, through corruption, divide up the lucrative market for public works paid for from various budgets?
Well, since we Catalans have memory and experience, we already know all this. The various cases, under the generic rubric of "3%," are still open, dealing with the almost identical phenomenon to the current Spanish one: cost overruns, commissions, irregular financing, etc. of the major Catalan nationalist right-wing party. We've also seen it with the Gürtel, Púnica, Kitchen, and countless other corruption cases involving the PP, involving irregular financing, government fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, influence peddling, and a long list of other crimes. It remains to be seen whether the current socialist case is, as some claim, strictly personal or whether, as many others can reasonably assume, we are witnessing systemic, organic, collective behavior.
What is clear is that the fierce competition between some and others to achieve the highest level of political corruption is imprinting a horrific quality on the functioning of a supposedly European and democratic state. But all of this, at its core, is merely the festering part.
The final judgment on the state of health of Spanish democracy is closed and sentenced: "all politicians are the same", "democracy doesn't work", "we pay taxes so these thieves can take everything"... In the same way that everyone knows that, depending on how some of us react, some of us react to them, some of us react to them, to the Spanish and Catalan extreme right.
A state of democratic emergency has been declared. To escape it, the country must choose between the obscurantist path ("!Ayuso and closes Spain!") and the republican path of equity and honesty. Now everything depends on the reaction of the PSOE itself and that of the forces that supported it to form a government two years ago.
Let's be clear, with everything we've learned in recent weeks, Pedro Sánchez has reset the score. Vox is no longer enough to offset the cost of the alleged corruption of a pseudo-progressive socialism. A socialism also incapable of maintaining a minimum coherence with the rhetoric of the famous "democratic regeneration," always pending but never present on the real agenda for the governance of the State. An agenda, of course, that offers credibility and sufficient guarantees to be carried out in the next two years of the legislature. the State.
The open avenues for agreeing on this new agenda may be diverse in their formalization, as long as they offer specificity and a guarantee of application. We are facing a vote of confidence. de facto, with or without parliamentary implementation. With new legislation, certainly. With a new government, including all the forces that now support it in parliament, why not? With new leadership free from corrupting contamination, too. We democrats must be truly relentless once and for all, and at the forefront, we need to find those "who are not the same," those who "make democracy work," and who have not and will never keep a single euro of public money. There are many of them.
