Just imagine: the farmer, overwhelmed by what is coming his way, listens, thanks to television or radio, to the words of the President of the Generalitat or the President of the Government. They are serious words, even solemn, but they sound empty to him. They remind you of those kinds of phrases that doctors use when you have to go through something unpleasant and you have no choice but to put up with it.
Pere Aragonès has declared that the drought "is the most serious and urgent problem that we have as a country" and Pedro Sánchez has stated that the actions on the drought must be a "State policy" because "they require participation and commitment not only verbal, but also economic and legislative of the set of institutions and public actors”.
Our friend, the farmer, does not understand exactly what those we have chosen to manage the general interest are trying to say. He only thinks about the harvest that he will probably have to sacrifice to save the trees on which everything he has rests.
The drought forces the ruler of the day to perform a circus number that he must perform without a net. The chrism of the defective is in danger. Accustomed to politics as a story that contains and delimits reality as a corset does with someone's body, public leaders seem clumsy, insecure and unconvincing when they cannot use a clear narrative that makes sense (justify, explain, dilute or mask) certain facts. "Explain your story and you will win", is something that any political adviser recommends to his patron to move on the board.
In the electoral campaign – we are already in it, de facto – each candidate posts his story and that is how the game develops, with more or less talent, and with more or less naturalness. Faced with drought, there is no story to tell and the dictionary is useless. All the words disappear when colliding with the imponderables that escape the control of the institutions, beginning with the rain.
The fact that the drought is related to climate change or that there are different policies on the management of water resources does not relativize the hazardous background of a problem whose approach puts the structural limits of the policy on the table. Remember: a Minister of the Generalitat, a few years ago, ended up praying to the Virgin of Montserrat for it to rain.
I empathize with the farmer who sees the rulers as poor dolls, who issue a prefabricated speech to calm down the spirits in the face of what is going terribly wrong. But I also empathize with those rulers who, confident in the magic of the story, prove the impotence of their levers and pedestals when reality strikes down all the forecasts of their chiefs of staff, their advisers and their speech writers.
The drought has relentlessly overwhelmed the legislatures of Aragonès and Sánchez (and of any head of government who has to deal with it) and both leaders are dragged into a terrain in which their usual tools are of little use. Hearing them talk about the measures against drought is to rediscover the obvious: in an emergency that generates several conflicts, the discourse becomes a crooked key, a blunt nail, a knife that does not cut. Official messages about the drought are blunt and public disbelief is growing. Politics fail. The farmer has disconnected, passes from Aragonès and Sánchez.
With the covid pandemic, the rulers were also overwhelmed by reality, but they sensed that the trick was to change the scale of the story. Faced with an exceptional problem, an equally exceptional narrative: health above all else, we must avoid the collapse of health services, all of humanity is at risk, etc. Some went a bit too far, like those military chiefs who, at a press conference, loaded their interventions with so many war metaphors that they skidded and, in the end, disappeared from Dr. Fernando Simón's cartoon, to avoid greater evils.
The theater of perceptions –that of politics itself– is governed by credibility more than by veracity. Good political stories create an effective artifice that manages to be considered authentic by the receiver-citizen. That is imposed as “the real”. Fortunately, sometimes, the facts blow all the scripts and you have to improvise. We are there. It is the moment of truth, in its full literality.
