ReachExtra
Opinion: ‘Politics No Longer Adds Up’ by Ángel Luis Jiménez Rodríguez
They say you don’t really know your brother until it’s time to split the inheritance, nor your partner until you need to agree on a divorce settlement.
To me, these popular sayings are depressing because they describe the miserable side of the human condition. But we must admit, these sayings exist because they reflect either current situations or those that we often go through throughout our lives. In fact, any form of love, either familial or sentimental, can degrade when you must give something up to reach an agreement.
The old system whereby a party could govern on its own is finished and alliances have to be made because without alliances there can be neither politics nor good government. In an active democracy, the loser is not the person who doesn’t get their way, but the one to throw in the towel and leave the table.
The tenacious exercise of consensus is a heavy one; all decisions are slow, and they require the utmost patience from participants. It requires an ethical commitment to conceive that it is not a question of winning, but of shaking hands with your adversary at the end of the process.
There are lines in the sand to be drawn regarding these approaches, such as, of course, excluding the extreme right from any agreement. And this is something that must be made clear before and after the elections. In Spain, unfortunately, this is not the case.
In recent times, the Spanish political class demonstrates daily its inability to reach agreements. They don’t realise that the lack of consensus will drive this country to sheer foolishness. Spain cannot continue to function, even though the economy is advancing at cruising speed with no one behind the wheel.
The parties have a kind of blind and selfish persistence and are very willing to thwart any kind of understanding. This is a bad example for the people, because it generates a civil detachment to those who see how only partisan interests prevail.
Even to make a good opposition, be it from the right, left or via activism, there must be a government.
And if this government doesn’t have a majority, permanent negotiation becomes the norm. And woe to those who understand it differently.
Citizens should react to these bullies who have but one agenda – their own – which is measured only by the ‘what-do-I-get-in-exchange?’ gauge. It is the closed-mindedness of the lazy, of the arrogant, of those who profit from mess and who strongly disrupt coexistence.
Today, the political composition of governments in Spain and Europe is laborious, but it is unavoidable to consider it a moral duty not to leave the table. In Spain, being a ‘chulo’ (cocky) should cease to be a virtue, once and for all.
Because those empty signs of masculinity, those red lines towards Sánchez’s government, hide a symptom of weakness and decadence: the infantile reaction by those who live obsessively in the past, or in a quite uncertain future. What a country.
Opinion: ‘Politics No Longer Adds Up’ by Ángel Luis Jiménez Rodríguez
