The essay by journalist and writer Enric Juliana, Spain: the pact and the fury. A political history of our country from 11-M to the present, reads like a novel of politics and ideas, based on the selection of articles published in La Vanguardia over the last twenty years, managing to reawaken and give life to political and social events that have marked our lives.
Enric Juliana's ability to generate metaphors, comparisons and analogies when analyzing strategies and political action makes us feel the vertigo that the protagonists of politics feel when power and their survival are at stake. Its vigorous and original way of narrating, interpreting and reflecting on politics and the events that constitute it has the power of the ancient great epic stories, where classical authors had the ability to read the oracles and the designs of the gods to establish the birth or collapse of an empire.
The political history that Juliana offers us begins in 2004, the year in which a new political stage was founded in Spain, after the attacks of March 11, when the Popular Party was quick to blame the terrorist group ETA for the attack. at Madrid's Atocha station by a group of jihadists who were inspired by Al Qaeda messages. It was the beginning of using lies as the foundation of the moral tone, based on dispute and disagreement, which has shaped the way of operating in Spanish politics ever since.
Juliana will open and conclude her essay with this observation: “The last weeks of 2023 summarize with total intensity the last twenty years. “It all started in 2004, because in the beginning it was a lie.” There have been twenty years marked by pact and fury in Spanish politics. The pact and fury act like a political pendulum where initiatives, agreements and divergences balance between fury, which is one of the degrees with which anger ends up being expressed and which advances in people's temperament through of anger, indignation or rage as a motivation to engage in politics, and the pact, necessary to reach agreements to survive and achieve power.
The essential thing in his political analysis is that he never stops at what is newsworthy, but rather seeks in the facts, in the shadows and lights of the protagonists who have caused them, the signs that help to better understand the human condition. Juliana traces with absolute precision the political trajectory of Spain, as if it were measuring the trajectory of a bullet, establishing the speed and the effect of the Earth's rotation on it, in order to determine the weapon with which it was fired. and, in this way, know who was the author of the shot.
It measures the trajectory that the process has drawn and that has ended up converging with the trajectory of the PSOE to preserve power; or the trajectory of political corruption that explains the fall of the PP due to the Gürtel case; the loss of power in Andalusia of the PSOE derived from the ERE; or the end of Convergència due to the Palau case. These trajectories allow Juliana to affirm that “2004 lives in 2024” since the political reality in which we are immersed began to take shape twenty years ago.
His essay has the nerve and quality of a novel, not so much because of its great capacity for literary elaboration but because of the author's scope of vision. There is so much that is seen, intuited, observed, deduced and discovered, that it is necessary to generate literary resources, such as the creation of fictional dialogues or the recreation of encounters experienced with some protagonists of Spanish politics, to reveal what the data cannot reach. show. It is worth reading Spain: the pact and the fury to discover that Spanish politics is also the product of human passions.
Enric Juliana Spain, the pact and the fury Harp. 624 pages. 24.90 euros
