Fear, lover of the future

Is the center back? The Andalusian elections seem to indicate this.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
26 June 2022 Sunday 20:02
16 Reads
Fear, lover of the future

Is the center back? The Andalusian elections seem to indicate this. But: does moderantism return? Or is it rather fear, what predominates, in this moment of maximum uncertainty and insomniac accumulation of problems?

Fear guards the vineyard, it was said in Catalan, in the old days of saving. Now that saving is penalized by banks and states, and by capitalism itself (already strictly financial), inflation rises above the middle classes as the ultimate monster. Runaway inflation is the prologue to general impoverishment. The fear of this inflationary monster (added to the concern generated by the current world: pandemic, war, unrest and conflicts in neighboring North Africa) has pushed Andalusian voters to seek refuge in the conservative. Surely the Andalusians have written the prologue to the general vote of the Spaniards. But the future is not written. It is likely to get worse. From the crisis of 2008 to the current crisis, so many negative things have happened that, written in a list, could be confused with the script of a horror film.

The fear of the middle classes objectively benefits Feijóo. But if, upon becoming president, Feijóo cannot tame the monster (on a global scale) and if the European Central Bank fails to prevent the Spanish debt from exploding, then economic disarray would be guaranteed, the vineyards would be set on fire, and the extremisms of right and left in the blink of an eye they would be back. Is the center back? Fear reigns.

Fear will be the partner of the future. Let's look at what happens in France. Macron (able to balance liberalism with the social democratic bias of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne) defends a centered, open, patriotic, pro-European position. In his speech of thanks for the (relative, insufficient) victory in the legislative elections, he spoke of the responsibility of all parties and the need to refound and recreate democracy to mend the fractures in France. Macron is very smart. Surely there is no leader in Europe of his intellectual capacity. But this discourse based on the prefix re- (refound, recreate, reunite), is hardly credible, since during his first five-year presidential term Macron has worked to expel a good part of the French from the "reasonableness" and "true interest" of France. The fracture of a country is not only the fault of those who become radicalized, but also of those who turn a deaf ear to the causes that push part of the population to become radicalized. Instead of fostering common goals to bring together, Macron, who needed to seize exclusive central space, has fostered division and exclusion: they, the extremists; I, the centered.

The center also plays its balls in polarization billiards. Indignation, extremism, separatism and so many forms of populist reaction can be very negative when they crystallize politically. But they explode for objective, real, bloody reasons. Some reasons that the centered (that is: those who live their social or political existence without major problems) do not want to hear, because they relativize, underestimate, silence them. Having reasons to complain does not excuse mindless radicalism, of course. But demonizing those who fall into radicalism, without wanting to understand (address) the causes that push them, is tricky. In such a case, the appropriate word is not centrism, but cynicism.