9 and 1/2 weeks from Puigdemont

This summer I was foolishly worried about our hung parliament; the provisional government and the skyrocketing public debt, that at dinners with friends I asked if there was going to be an investiture or investitures.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
19 September 2023 Tuesday 04:23
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9 and 1/2 weeks from Puigdemont

This summer I was foolishly worried about our hung parliament; the provisional government and the skyrocketing public debt, that at dinners with friends I asked if there was going to be an investiture or investitures... And I have taken some notes:

1) I was left alone asking, because the majority seemed, beyond Barbiehaimer and Rubialdemont, to have more important things to comment on and looked at me as if I were talking to them about life in Centaurus.

2) And we must rejoice and take it not as frivolous indifference towards our politics; but as a healthy confidence that what is most relevant in it no longer depends on mutating parties or repeated elections, but on our strong institutions and a mature civil society. People pass – thank God – because they know that nothing will happen.

3) Maybe we are not a Scandinavian democracy; But the alarmed few who, on the other hand, see us sailing like unconscious dancers in the Waterloo orchestra towards the iceberg of chaos, secession and economic collapse and propose large rescue boats and historic pacts to save us... overreact.

No big deal, columnist friends, smoke sellers and pollsters with taximeters: we will not drown in this glass of water of ambitions and little burdens that will be the 9 and 1/2 weeks that we have left today until there is a president or the polls.

4) The wisest – and well-placed – of my diners have responded with short sentences and a lot of cynicism: “There will be President Sánchez again, because he and the Waterloo one are more interested than the alternative. And all the noise that his mariachis make will affect us only to the extent that we pay attention to it.”

5) As in Nine and a Half Weeks by Kim Bassinger, the mediocre dialogue and predictable plot will only be an excuse for the contortion that today is as innocent as it is boring except for boomers nostalgic for the ideology. The hardcore porn in vogue will continue to be that of ERC against Junts; Feijóo's in front of the rising young woman in her party; and that of Sánchez before the old people who in theirs can take away votes when they are needed most.