They voted for them to decide

Now he has given them for not doing their job.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
05 October 2022 Wednesday 17:39
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They voted for them to decide

Now he has given them for not doing their job. I mean that, sometimes, the politicians who rule choose to turn the tables on those below, instead of making the decisions that derive from the contract between the electorate and the elected. We live in a representative democracy (citizens delegate to our representatives the difficult task of choosing between different responses), but some try to sell moments of supposed participatory democracy, to hide, without a doubt, their fear of getting wet.

Today and tomorrow, Junts per Catalunya holds a consultation among its militancy to find out if this party should continue or leave the Government of the Generalitat. It was a commitment of the management with the bases and now it is being carried out, in light of the latest crisis between the partners of the regional Executive. It seems like an exemplary exercise to give militants a voice, but it is still a way of outsourcing the responsibility of those who claim to be leaders in this space. Did Laura Borràs, Jordi Turull and the rest of the Junts leadership not have information and clear criteria to make one decision or another and explain it? Leading is not assuming the risk of being wrong?

In Catalonia, this type of consultation has been, until today, a specialty of the CUP, an organization that has very little to do with conventional parties. The assembly mechanics of the anti-capitalists have endowed them with liturgies of this nature, sometimes converted into something worthy of Monty Python, as when they tied 1,515 votes in the December 2015 assembly to decide whether or not to invest Artur Mas as president. . What is new is that this way of operating has been adopted by Junts, a brand that reflects the tradition of the convergent space, to which sectors that come from other parties and certain currents of activism have been added.

The machine that Carles Puigdemont founded oscillates daily between the old convergent identity (shamefully hidden at times) and the desire to imitate the CUP and the rites of the ANC or other platforms, a dualism that can mislead and create stupefaction (for use the same word as Xavier Trias) between insiders and outsiders. The militant has the future of the Government in his hands, and the debate on this matter includes rational arguments, emotional appeals and very personal reactions, all very mixed. What moves the bases to cast one vote or another is an enigma.

Let's open the focus beyond this case. In the same way that some confuse transparency with childish mimicry from the plot of power, there are also those who confuse the deepening of democracy with the abandonment of responsibility that is linked to a certain position. Perhaps the fear of being unpopular has turned into a panic and no one wants to push the button. Democratic leadership cannot be a “command and command”, but neither can it be a layer that is casually forgotten in the wardrobe when the challenge is more uncomfortable, thankless and complicated.

What determines the political mission is the tragic character of every decision that affects the general interest, that is what turns the task of the ruler into an adventure that always takes place in the fog of war (because we already know that, in reality, politics is the continuation of war with other means, and not the other way around, as the quote from the classic says). How are we going to take someone who aspires to lead seriously if he delegates to everyone else the most relevant part of his commitment as primus inter pares?