State pacts, that fetish of the political chronicle, have disappeared. The ability of the two parties with the largest representation to agree on major issues, dragging with it other forces in the Chamber, seems to have vanished, while the General Council of the Judiciary continues to be blocked and the tone of the parliamentary dispute seems doomed. to the constant fuss and denial of the rival. And behind all this there is also a growing confinement of the parties also in personal relationships.
In the Cortes, the most veteran remember that years ago, not so many, it was not strange to see, after the plenary sessions, groups of socialist and popular deputies sharing refreshments and carousing in places like the historic Casa Manolo, an unlikely scene today. It is not necessary to incur in the idealization - and there is the session diary to verify that, at least since the nineties, the parliamentary anger has known rude episodes and registered tremendous accusations -, but it is true that today the atmosphere among its lordships is very different. And that this has political consequences that are difficult to measure.
Carlos Aragonés, who was director of the Cabinet of the Presidency with José María Aznar and took deputy minutes for the first time in 1993, considers that this impoverishment process has two elements, one formal and the other structural. On the one hand, Aragonés locates in the arrival of Podemos in Congress, and in particular in its leader, Pablo Iglesias, the start of a more direct and crude vocabulary in the parliamentary struggle, less elaborate. On the other, he believes that the bankruptcy of the political coexistence between the PSOE and the PP occurred with the attacks of March 2004. "The difficult coexistence between the PSOE and PP comes as a result of Atocha, somehow the Spanish political community remains without the common political object”. That is why he believes that behind the verbal violence that we are witnessing today "there is a lot of previous underground shock." And it is, therefore, a fundamental political rupture that, in his opinion, is reflected in the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy, which "was not illegitimate, but it was an abuse of the mechanism."
Today's spokesman for the socialist parliamentary group, Patxi López, agrees on that fateful date, March 2004, as the turning point in relations between the two majority parties, due to "the PP's inability to assume defeat." There, the accusations of illegitimacy towards the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero began to increase, encouraged by the mendacious theory of the 11-M conspiracy, which attributed the attacks to ETA and indicted the collaboration of the socialists in a massacre that had an objective political.
And there is a third obvious milestone, which is clearly perceived today in the courtyard of Congress and in the corridors: the irruption of Vox, with its anti-system and therefore anti-institutional strategy. It is not only a Trumpist dramatization in the stands, it is also an express denial of the rival. As an example, last Thursday, while the EH-Bildu deputy Jon Iñarritu attended to cameras and microphones in the corridor of Congress, the Vox deputy Luis Gestoso passed behind him, who without stopping insulted the press: "Launderers of terrorists," he told reporters. An unthinkable scene just five years ago.
This does not mean that there are no courteous and even friendly relations between deputies from opposing political forces. Iñárritu and Aragonés have had a cordial relationship for a long time, and it is not difficult to hear the spokesman for Unidas Podemos, Pablo Echenique, speak with sincere appreciation of the spokesman for Ciudadanos, Edmundo Bal, one of the members of the party that maintains better relations with the rest of the formations of the Chamber, despite his energetic way of conducting himself in the press room or in the stands. Joan Tardà, who was the spokesperson for ERC until 2019, was not uncommon to see him in the courtyard of the Lions, in the moments of greatest political anger of the process, chatting (and smoking) with deputies from the PP, Cs and of course the PSOE. "I never had to avoid meeting anyone in the elevator," he recalls, "although I don't know what it would be like today, with Vox in Parliament."
That courtesy of yesteryear, the deputies agree, did not bring the resolution of the big issues closer or feed the State pacts, but it was lived intensely in the presentations of the commissions and helped to overcome obstacles, to agree on amendments or to cede, in the conviction of that there would be reciprocity. The Basque and Catalan formations were the pivot of this dynamic between PP and PSOE, but the current disappearance of the "common object" has blocked that path.
Aragonés points out that, in addition to the underlying political motives, the role of the media is no stranger to this de-professionalization of relations between politicians, which are now presided over by personal drama. In every debate there seems to be an agonizing collision that infects the way in which their lordships conduct themselves and crosses the borders of political representation until it coagulates in enmity. Something that is linked to the dynamics of "famousness", says Aragonés, which the media permeate. López remembers having experienced that in Basque politics, at the turn of the century, during Aznar's second legislature, which coincided with Ibarretxe's first as lehendakaritza. That had an impact on Basque society, “fractured, a society of silence”, he recalls.
That fear shared by the socialist and the popular, the risk that this verbal violence, challenging the adversary, soaks the country, inoculated from the media, and that, as in Euskadi twenty years ago, or in Catalonia five years ago, social conversation get poisoned After all, as anthropology points out, the coexistence of the human species does not rest on unsolicited crude frankness, but on those tepid concessions to manners and respect, those that build civilizations.
