The Government's Contingency and Savings Plan has something of the old joke popularized in the USSR that put the following phrase in the mouth of a member of the proletariat: "We pretend that we work and they -referring to the State- pretend that they pay us". The Spanish version of the present could be this: "We show that we trust the Government's measures and they show that they have studied everything." Sánchez, always gimmicky – is it possible to govern in another way today? –, has put on the table a decree law between improvised and hasty that, more than changing our lives, what it intends is to send a message to Brussels and another to Public opinion.
Community partners are sent what is convenient at this time. It is fair: we are for the task of helping, you know that we are a reliable and supportive partner. And the Spaniards are reminded, by way of facts, of what they have been warned since the war began: we told you that it would not be free and here you have a new bill to add to inflation. The two messages – the domestic and the international – are timely and necessary. Another thing is that with these measures energy consumption is going to be reduced by 7% –perhaps with the arreón of the untie and those of us who shower with cold water we will reach that figure– and that it is through haste and improvisation that they must be legislated far-reaching issues such as those raised by the decree. It seems that we are back to a covid scenario again. The Government, forced to show that it has the situation under control, and in parallel, a bunch of bureaucrats improvising paragraphs that make some sense and that are coherent when it comes to explaining them and sending them urgently to the BOE for printing.
The response of the autonomous communities –Ayuso openly calling for disobedience, the PNV announcing its own saving protocol in September and the others in a kind of each madman with his theme– is disheartening. Although they are right to the extent that once again they are forced to become the police of the new legality in which they neither puncture nor cut in its elaboration. The co-governance of Pedro Sánchez is removable: he puts it in the speeches and removes it in the actions.
The truth is that the measures are not much at the moment. Lots of bread, less cheese. We will be warm in the places where we were now cold, we will have to recover the habit of going to work in winter with appropriate clothes and not as before – the suspenders in the office are over in January –, we will stop fooling around eating dinner in December on terraces with stoves and thieves will find it easier to rob businesses taking advantage of the darkness. Nothing special. They put in people's heads, yes, the idea that the world has changed for the worse and open the channel to uncertainty and fear, which is what allows governments to better manage themselves in hard times like the that are announced to us.
The measures and speeches of Western executives contrast with Vladimir Putin's announcement inviting Europeans to move to Russia with the sarcastic claim of cheap energy and endless hot baths. The Russian president's announcement exemplifies his main advantage, which is, at the same time, the disadvantage of the others. It doesn't matter how his people are going, it doesn't matter when the elections are. It is not a variable that he should contemplate. On the contrary, German, Italian, Spanish, French and other politicians walk around, rulers and opposition, with calculators in hand, trying to guess at every moment what the pain threshold of their populations is, either to avoid losing the government if it has, well to reach it if it is opposition. That is why Tuesday's decree law has the air of a simple preoperative. Nothing we can't fix with sweat in summer and coats in winter. And it diverts attention from the economy, which is where we have already been truly noticing that we are at war, although we still do not believe it because we do not do levies, we go on vacation and we have not repatriated corpses. That, that we begin to believe it, is the decree.
