Political cordons sanitaire are as effective as trying to stop a wave with your arms. The same good intention as during the pandemic, when we walked around with a mask outdoors and took it off – with permission from the governments – to lock ourselves in a bar to socialize with other patrons. The logic of the cordon sanitaire is that of those who believe, like babies, that it is enough to cover their faces for the reality that we dislike to disappear.
Socialists, Republicans, Junteros, Comuneros and Cuperos yesterday signed a unity pact against the extreme right through which they commit to “not legitimize” either Vox or Aliança Catalana, in the event that this formation obtains parliamentary representation. The agreement includes rejecting his support without exceptions, even if it would be useful to win votes, including – we assume – a hypothetical investiture. There is a mystery that is clarified, if something can be completely clarified in the campaign: the impossibility of investing an independence president with the entire sovereigntist bloc voting in unison if the still non-existent seats of Joan of Arc were necessary for this. ripollesa.
The “not legitimizing” the political action of an acronym comes from a sovereign mistake. And democratic legitimation is given by citizen votes, not by the decisions of the rest of the political formations. Unless it is accepted naturally that many individuals should not be allowed to vote, either because they are idiots or because they are idiotic. Since this would place us on the dark side of force, we must conclude that in democratic purity, legitimacy has nothing to do with each person's convictions. A very different thing is that one decides that with a type of people he has nothing to talk to and that he would not leave them in charge of the children even to go look for bread at the corner store. But that neither gives nor takes away any democratic legitimacy.
A look at the European continent illustrates the great failure of cordons sanitaire in two ways. On the one hand, they have not managed to stop the rise of far-right options and they are falling one after another like dominoes. On the other hand, even more notable, they have not served to prevent center-right and center-left options from adopting some postulates that only a few years ago would have been classified as ultras. As Catalonia is no stranger to the logic of the continent's problems, it had to happen – now that other distractions are no longer so entertaining – that immigration ended up becoming a central axis of the campaign because it has been a nuclear part of the conversation for some time now. citizen. Chastity belts, those are sanitary cords, do not work because as a resource they always arrive late. When a significant part of the social body has stopped believing in virginity.
