When a government fails at what is easy

“It must be admitted that, today, governing is not easy at all. At least, not as easy as years ago”. I write the sentence in quotes because I hear it more and more often said in private by politicians from different parties, both from the Government and the opposition. They cite the impoverishment of workers, the lack of housing, media atomization and the impossibility of directing the narrative due to the multiplication of emitters, the hostile environment of social networks, the harm caused to people's pockets by political or economic decisions made thousands of kilometers away, the magnitude and frequency of natural disasters, etc. Some add bureaucracy, which slows down (when it doesn't drown) administrative processes, and the labor consequences that the deployment of AI may entail (Bill Gates has just stated that it is socially more dangerous than the technology industry admits).

The parties will know if they want to agree to jointly confront some of these problems or if they prefer to let them rot in the name of a supposed ideological coherence that allows them to oppose and then regret it in private.

Meanwhile, however, there are inadmissible problems, such as the one created by the Department of Education with the PISA tests. The minister's explanations were clear, but they also point to her and, therefore, to the president. This is called failing at the easiest thing, because we are not talking about any pandemic. It is a mess that would harm any party, but more so one that came to government with the presumption of knowing how to run the administration, without that absorption of all problems due to the Process. The threat of a strike at the beginning of the school year, beyond the responsibility of the unions, is another alarm bell in the Department of Education, where the previous Esquerra government already stumbled.