The truth is that one does not win for scares. I tell you this because I read these days that there is underway, by two platforms promoted by some of the same people who promoted the defunct UPyD and the comatose Ciudadanos, an operation to set up a center-left party.
I don't know what Carrizosa and the long-suffering Cs deputies who still roam the Parliament will think about it, but I can't stop thinking about an old joke. A gravedigger is walking through the cemetery with a shovel on his shoulder, when a scream is heard and a hand emerges from the ground and grabs him by the leg, moaning: “Help, I'm not dead,” to which the funeral worker reacts by hitting him with his hand. shovel and muttering: “You, what you are is badly buried.”
Because the logical question would be: if you already have a founded party and even with some meager political representation, why are you going to found another one exactly the same? Note that the most curious thing is that the role of the gravedigger is also assumed by Messrs. Bal and Igea, prominent members of Ciudadanos until their expulsion four days ago.
The founding manifesto of one of the platforms is called The Third Spain and quotes Machado's verses about the little Spaniard whose heart is going to freeze. The verse is good, and the figure of Machado is hardly objectionable. Another thing is the opinion that the republican poet may have had of the political career of those who invoke him and of the setbacks that, supposedly, for the sake of harmony, they distribute to the left and the right. Above all because the invectives always go more towards the PSOE, and especially towards the perfidious Pedro Sánchez, than towards the PP. Call me naive, but something tells me that the search for moderation and great consensus does not fit very well with the hyperbolic virulence that has been the hallmark since the times of Rosa Díez and Albert Rivera.
In any case, the idea now seems to be the creation of a “social democratic left” party that gives shelter to those who feel orphaned in the current bloc politics, perhaps forgetting that four days ago (2019) they touched the sky with their hands. and they were about to snatch the hegemony of the right from the PP. In short, orphanhood is very recent and leftism has somewhat supervened.
The thing is not without its that, because, at least in Cs's environment, “social democrat” was something very similar to an insult and synonymous with a lack of firmness in convictions. “Social Democrat” was the PSC, always willing to dialogue with the independentists; “Social democrat” was Rajoy until he decided to compromise the reputation of the Police in actions whose clumsiness still astonishes and “social democrat” is Feijóo on alternate days, especially when he passes through Barcelona and starts talking about autonomies and recognized nationalities in the Constitution. Come on, what a social democrat any soft-hearted country-seller is.
You can even apply the nine-point test: as soon as Ciudadanos began to expand throughout the country, the first thing it did was hold a congress to expel social democracy from its program; The second thing was to call the left-wing government coalition a “band”; and the third thing was to dedicate some adjectives to those who did not share his idea of the unity of Spain that would have earned him sidelong glances even at a Vox convention.
Now they can talk about nostalgia for the “old” PSOE of Felipe González y Guerra, but anyone can remember how little they liked it. To a certain extent, they were born against him, against his passivity in the face of nationalism, against the government majorities that he achieved with methods very similar to those that Sánchez now uses, against what in other latitudes is called political negotiation and here intolerable concessions that put in endangers the unity of the country.
It is the eternal drama of these parties of intellectuals overrepresented in the media: they do not alleviate bloc politics and contribute to fragmentation. They only obtain votes from former PSOE and PP voters and contribute to uniting the independence movement. They also forget something structural that Felipe González and Aznar! They were clear at the time: in the absence of absolute majorities it is impossible to govern in Spain without nationalists who, on the other hand, deserve to be listened to with the same respect as any other political option.
On the other platform, Nexo, for lack of something better to do, I will closely follow their next adventures.
