When the street is the angry and tumultuous scene to respond to citizen interests and concerns, it is because the institutions have been overwhelmed by events. Protests are typical of free societies and express the discomfort of minority or majority sectors towards the different powers of the State, demanding responses to problems derived from laws and specific actions.
There are many reasons why we have reached the tension that exists in Western democracies, in which a clear leadership crisis with ethical dimensions can be seen. One of them is to have given the street the role that the institutions have not been able to or have not wanted to exercise. Politics, said De Gaulle, is made in institutions and not in demonstrations. The street can become the breathing space of collective life in moments of great crisis, but it is not the appropriate political agora to resolve what worries people most.
What is at stake today is not the announced amnesty law that should normalize politics in Catalonia and Spain, erasing the criminal effects of the events of September and October 2017. What is most relevant is the weakness of the three heterogeneous blocks that They have shaped Spanish politics since Pedro Sánchez has been president.
Theoretically, there are two blocs, the left and the right, that are incapable of reaching framework agreements while maintaining their opposing policies whether they are in government or in the opposition. The issue is that neither the PSOE nor the PP have enough strength to form the majorities necessary to obtain an investiture. The popular ones got 137 seats and the socialists 121. Núñez Feijóo was not enough to get Santiago Abascal's 33 seats or Pedro Sánchez's Yolanda Díaz's 31 seats.
Then the third block appears, formed by a heterogeneous mix of pro-independence, nationalist and regionalist parties that have committed to investing Pedro Sánchez if he meets the demands of some accidental traveling companions, who have their priorities and put them on the table. talks. None of these three blocks has sufficient autonomy to govern. They need each other and at the same time hate each other.
The paradox that Carles Puigdemont, a fugitive from Spanish justice but an MEP with more than a million votes, is the cornerstone for Junts to hand over the presidency to Pedro Sánchez constitutes the epicenter of all the contradictions, by raising the auction prices institutional that Puigdemont takes the opportunity to request amnesty, which is equivalent to the State recognizing that the Rajoy government, Sánchez himself, the judges, the King and the current laws were wrong when applying 155.
Mark Twain suggests to Tom Sawyer on his travels along the Mississippi that he ask what happens to great nations when they make mistakes. The answer is nothing. The State can make mistakes and can be unfair. But he digests humiliation very badly. The problem is that the processing of the amnesty does not come alone but will be accompanied by upward requests after having signed the investiture pact. A large majority of Spaniards, including 12% of socialist militants and I suspect many more left-wing voters, do not subscribe to this strategy of Pedro Sánchez.
Hence the left's well-founded fear of precipitating new elections that would very possibly benefit Núñez Feijóo and to a lesser extent Vox. Neither Oriol Junqueras nor Carles Puigdemont would emerge well from immediate elections. The fear of submitting to the polls now makes the legislature's pact to invest Pedro Sánchez practically inevitable.
In this context, the Popular Party does not know how to wait nor does it take into account the importance of timing in politics. Taking protests against Sánchez's actions to the streets of all the Spanish capitals is wasting the enormous strength that the Popular Party has in the Senate, in the governments of eleven autonomous communities, in dozens of councils and in hundreds of city councils. Govern and manage. When the street gets too hot, the institutions get cold. Harold Macmillan said that the essence of politics is timing, doing things in their time, neither before nor after. More politics and less noise.
