His Excellency is the fourth film starring Mario Moreno, the popular Cantinflas. It is from 1967 and is one of those that had the best commercial fortune in theaters around the world. In fact, at its New York premiere it coincided with and beat Charles Chaplin's The Countess from Hong Kong at the box office. In this film, Cantinflas is a very minor diplomat from the Republic of Cocos, who works – that is to say – at the embassy of his country in Pepeslavia. By chance and by the grace of a crazy script, he will not only end up being the ambassador, but will star in a memorable speech before what is supposed to be the General Assembly of the United Nations. And in fact the speech, run over and convoluted in the purest Cantinflas style, connects him with Chaplin from The Great Dictator, although his artistic stature is much lower and the comparisons hateful. In any case, at one point in that monologue, a formal and official Cantinflas utters the following pearl (savour slowly): “We are worse, but we are better, because before we were fine, but it was a lie. Not like now, when we're in a bad way, but it's true”.
Priceless and irrefutable! And it serves both to explain the current economic situation, in which the announced apocalypse has not yet arrived, and to dress up a possible speech by Núñez Feijóo himself, very much in his style heir to Rajoy and close, at times, to the immortal Cantinflas. We are worse but we are better is almost the paradoxical and absurd motto of the last governments that have been in Spain. And they share it with the faithful and Cainite opposition.
Something happens, of course, when so many social and political leaders bet on the worse, the better. And there are plenty of examples, from the departure of Junts del Govern to the PP's attempts to denigrate any positive economic data that comes out of that Spain that they love so much and so little appreciate.
The best of the worst, in that sense, is the obvious, that from a catastrophic situation, you can only get better. Or stay alive and rule, which is already the best of the worst.
But something strange is happening to us, because that fragment from Cantinflas almost seems like a complete summary of where we're at. Curious, so much worse pessimism at a time that is actually hopeful. With the pandemic over and the economy not as battered as might be expected, few things should lead us to believe that we are worse than bad. But not even for those… I said, something very strange happens to us when, governing quite well, this president does not just like it. And that despite the unquestionable international recognition of him.
In short, there are months left for the municipal elections and more than a year for the general elections, so there is a party, as any castizo would say, but I am not sure if there will be the courage to accept that the best of the worst is that the worst does not end to arrive and the best is, also with the topic, to come.
Fatalism as a Hispanic symptom, perhaps. Or the disillusioned certainty that you are only better or worse by comparison, so everything is relative. But the storm is raging even though there are very few wickers for that basket. And day after day we are insisted on inflation, the employment data is doubted or the tiresome refrain of the government of independentists and supporters is repeated. That is why, let me play at being Cantinflas, it seems to me that the best of the worst is that the worst that does not arrive makes the one that did arrive better. In other words, it is better that we do not get worse, even if we are very bad.
