There was a time when when politicians did not know how to resolve an issue they created a commission. It was the power's way of running aground on problems, without the opposition being able to respond because it involved them in the search for a solution. The first to see that commissions were a joke was Napoleon, who wrote: “If you want something to be done, appoint someone responsible; “If you want something to be delayed forever, appoint a commission.” But the commissions continue to have prestige: just see that the independence movement has requested three investigative commissions, approved in Congress, on Operation Catalunya, the 17-A attacks in Barcelona and the Pegasus case. These commissions appear in the Constitution and are designed to seek political responsibilities, but experience teaches us that it is difficult to get anything clear, although they contribute to the public spectacle.
The latest discovery to try to unravel agreements or pacts are mediators. Mediators, rapporteurs or verifiers, which are terms that each of the parties uses at will to add or subtract essence. At this time, a mediator has been appointed to act as notary of the agreements between the PSOE and JxCat, another is expected to be present in the negotiations between the Government and the Generalitat and a few days ago we saw that the popular ones signed up to that figure – in this case, appointed by the EU –, which was accepted by Pedro Sánchez after the meeting with Alberto Núñez Feijóo to renew the General Council of the Judiciary.
All this allows us to deduce that Spanish politics is developed under the sign of distrust. Aristophanes, who was a Greek comedian who knew how to influence Athenian politics, said that distrust is the mother of security and in this sense it was a safe value to govern. But the truth is that this inability to understand each other without a referee in front only increases citizens' distrust in the political class. Any day, the parties will ask for VAR, as in football, to justify themselves to their team, when they believe that they have scored a goal through the squad.
