If in the communication that the President of the Government addressed last Wednesday to the citizens it was worth highlighting, beyond the solidarity with the personal feelings that animated it, what it contained was a call for a collective reflection on the ways and means of Spanish politics From his statement yesterday we must retain, above all, his appeal to the need for democratic regeneration.
It is true that democracies, ours too, have so far demonstrated a considerable capacity to metabolize the imbalances that polarization has brought, but no one can guarantee us that this capacity is unlimited. In the democracy reputed to be the oldest in the world, the North American one, an agonizing party ball was already saved with Biden's latest victory and we are once again in suspense over his possible defeat in November, while the enormous social fracture worsens that has opened in that country. And in the next European elections, a possible change of majorities could put at serious risk the historical project of European unity, the one with the greatest civilizing imprint that has ever been known and in which our own democratic design lies.
These truly existential risks for coexistence are nothing other than the consequence of a climate fueled by hatred of the adversary, which is the feeling that condenses and agitates today in democracies the rejection of political opponents and minorities, who are accused of putting in danger the social and cultural order, the existing order, the traditional one, the one that those who experience it believe, with the right to possess.
It is really a perverse war logic and it threatens to spread. The enemy can only be defeated and the end justifies the means, all of them, all that are within reach: personal disqualification, the insult, the hoax, the insidious use of the family... every day, at all times, through all the spokespersons. So we see how the enlightened heritage on which coexistence is based is eroded. The one that good teachers taught us, the one that we learned at home and we try to instill in our children, and that is expressed in ideas such as that you have to argue to persuade, you have to prove what you are accused of, you have to be willing to assume as our own the demands by which we judge others, or the simple personal ethics that demands not hurting our neighbor.
None of this is new, it is not new in Spanish politics, it is not new as a style of opposition, but now we are getting to know their exasperation.
I sincerely believe that after this call for collective reflection it will be somewhat more difficult to sneak the crudest, most corrosive material into the public space. And I am sure that the Government will try new initiatives to alleviate polarization, and will do well to do so even if it has little or no faith in the opposition. But this, and since democracy is alternation, those who aspire to govern in the future, should think about what margin of legitimacy they will have left to demand from the opposition a behavior different from that which they themselves now exhibit. If not to apply the Kantian ideal, at least for purely utilitarian reasons.
I have always been convinced that the containment exercised by the opposition is as good for it as it is for society as a whole. Although, yes, containment requires, even if it is counterintuitive, courage. And the deployment of constructive opposition, too.
In recent days, precisely on the occasion of my participation in the Catalan elections, I have affirmed, given the situation we are experiencing, the validity of a democracy of respect versus a democracy of hate. I know that the first seems like a pleonasm and the second an oxymoron, that is, that democracy always needs respect, but the truth is that ours, like others, already coexists with hatred.
Well, although the phenomenon continues, and that is why it continues to spread everywhere, through deep waters whose complex origin we may not yet be able to elucidate, we must all do everything possible to denounce it and reject it when it is expressed. Hate is incompatible with coexistence, it is the most opposite feeling that can be imagined to fit the ideal, and the need, of sharing a common destiny that respects each person's identity. This is how I have always believed, this is how I understand President Sánchez's proposal, and it is very easy for me to defend him along with Salvador Illa for the cities of Catalonia.
