The mistake is to think that people are logical. In the important things of life, like love, it is not. Nor in politics, particularly when it comes to voting, a circumstance in which emotion competes with facts, and emotion usually wins.
I think about the success of populism. I think of electoral behavior in countries as varied as Turkey, England, Mexico, South Africa, Russia and the United States. I think, a little, of Spain.
In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has just obtained the necessary majority to extend the presidential mandate. And the fact that, because of his management, the economy is in dire straits, with inflation above 40%; that abuses the judicial apparatus to criminalize the opposition and control the media; that an earthquake, in February, in which 50,000 people died, exposed a system of corruption in which cronyism weighs more than efficiency in the construction of houses.
Voting for Erdogan meant persisting in a government that is more dictatorial than democratic, more corrupt than competent. The Turkish people gave their verdict. They had already had him for nine years; now there are five more.
Mexico and South Africa are not so authoritarian, although they are on the way, but in terms of corruption they surpass Turkey, while in citizen insecurity they are in another league. But there is President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, light years ahead of the opposition in the polls, and there is the African National Congress, immortalized as the governing party long, long after Mandela's dream turned into a nightmare .
Russia: Let's not go into details. Let's say that, as everything indicates, a clear majority of Russians think that Putin is a piece of man.
England: Not only did they vote for the collective suicide of Brexit, but three years later, on the eve of economic collapse, they elected by an absolute majority the party that promised them paradise if they left the European Union.
And since we are with "mature democracies", how is the United States doing? Donald Trump is not only the strong favorite to be elected the Republican Party's presidential candidate for the 2024 election, but there is a growing feeling that he could win it. As The Economist said this week: “You have to take seriously the possibility that the next US president will be someone who divides the West and likes Vladimir Putin; that he accepts the results of the elections only if he wins them; who calls the thugs who broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021 martyrs... who is the subject of multiple investigations for violating criminal law, in addition to having a history of sexual assault...".
Putin plays in a different league, of course. But the others – Erdogan, López Obrador, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Boris Johnson – are pillars of rectitude, decency and democracy compared to Trump. The most mind-boggling thing, in the most literal sense of the word, is that the tens of millions of Trump devotees see no reason to question him.
The facts show that during his presidency, Trump did not come close to fulfilling the star electoral promise of building a wall along the border with Mexico and that, on the other hand, the only political idea that he managed to make a reality to be a juicy tax cut for 250,000 billionaires, which included him, but very few of his supporters, most of them low-income. But that's it. Faith moves mountains.
So why does faith win over logic? Why do facts count for so little in the political decisions that so many people make? Why do so many supposedly thinking beings identify with these tyrants or clowns or charlatans?
Because belonging to a team is the important thing. Because they see in the leader a father figure who offers them hope and protection in a confused and hostile world, an avenging general who shares the same enemies and the same hatreds and the same resentments as them. Because being part of the big daddy's team gives them a sense of belonging, of relevance, of identity that allows them to forget the terrible truth that they are - we are - nothing more than a grain of dust in the infinite cosmos.
This is what populism offers, which is not little. With the possible exception of eternal life, it is the same thing offered, in exchange for faith, by the great religions: an irresistible package of belonging, hope, refuge and order in chaos. The lesson is clear: the aspirant to political leadership who attends to earthly affairs competes in elections at the same disadvantage as a runner with a broken ankle in a marathon.
This is, to a certain extent, the case of Pedro Sánchez. The data indicated that he didn't deserve that pole in last weekend's election. "Hearing what the opposition is saying to Sánchez - an American friend who lives in Madrid told me this week - we could imagine that we were in Afghanistan".
As other foreign observers have pointed out, with some perplexity in view of the election results, Spain has the lowest inflation rate in Europe, minimum wage and record pensions, the crisis of Catalan independence has been controlled and, thanks to a large extent in the figure of Sánchez, it is not remembered when Spain enjoyed such international prestige.
But the logic of these events has not served the PSOE in the face of the visceral fury that Sánchez awakens within his country, in the face of the broken ankle that his government alliance with the equally visceral enemy he represents, for so many Spaniards, United We Can.
That said, we're not too bad. Voting against Sánchez was not an act entirely devoid of reason, just as it was voting in favor of Brexit or Erdogan. The electoral decisions in Spain cannot be compared in terms of nonsense with those of Turkey, Mexico, South Africa, England and the United States. We remain, relatively speaking, serious people here, democratic people. The losers will not challenge the outcome of the upcoming general election. But alert. Maybe one of these days they will. Dangerous winds blow across the seas and oceans. Or, as the Trumpians at Vox might say, there are Moors on the coast.
