The Bourbon sofa and the sports carousel

Whenever the Spanish national football team excels in any competition – and let's not even mention if that competition is the World Cup – the index of absurdity in political life skyrockets. Valle-Inclán would have had a field day these days. The image of Felipe VI, Queen Letizia and the princesses – or whatever their title is – Sofia and Leonor sitting on a cheap two-seater sofa watching Spain's match against France on a small TV propped up on some kind of scaffolding, in a damp and dark apartment, seemed like a bad joke. All that was missing was the unborn conceived to complete the picture of an ideal Spanish family, poor but decent and united. Trying to pass off the Bourbons as members of a sort of working-class family, who have a brief moment of happiness when the red one wins, and who then allow themselves to jump, dance, and hug in the humble dining room that is the setting for all their joys and sorrows, is excessive even for such a dilapidated and crude royal house as the Spanish one. At least they could do us the favor of not mocking the poor by dressing up as if they were. However: there is something even worse in all this, and that is that if they do it, it is because those who take care of their communication and image assume that it will work for them. That many citizens will accept the message and feel sympathy for monarchs who are "like them". Simultaneously, M. Rajoy, a former Spanish president who is not being investigated by the justice system (on the contrary: he appears before the courts with ostentatious and tolerated arrogance), has revived a concept from his years in office, that of the Spanish Brand. He gave a recital of it when he made the xenophobic statement that the French team was playing "without Frenchmen," and in a continuation in which, far from rectifying, he took the opportunity to attack the current government. Rajoy's writing (or whoever writes his articles, published, needless to say, in a hard-right online newspaper) is directly related to the Borbons' little house: something bizarre, disordered, unbecoming of a minimally educated person. Every public appearance by Rajoy always has an eccentric touch that in his case is intentional: Rajoy does not disguise himself as poor, but as a fool, and when everyone laughs he achieves exactly what he wanted: in Spanish there is the saying "Ande yo caliente y ríase la gente", which in Catalan could have as an equivalent – never more fitting – that of "Feed me and call me Moor".Rajoy, by the way, says that Sánchez acted as a "informer" to the French, and from the PP they have stated that the successes of the Spanish national team suit Sánchez very well as a smokescreen. If Feijóo and his try to present the red one as an agent of sanchismo, it might turn out even worse for them than comparing work absences with cancer. By the way, showing up at an international forum trying to sell that Sánchez is like Putin, Trump, or Xi Jinping ("an authoritarian president") doesn't fly either. Euphoria makes them lose their rhythm, and that has consequences. Not just in football.