“When the PSOE woke up one morning after uneasy dreams – perhaps due to cohabiting with Podemos -, it found itself in its bed transformed into a monstrous populism.” Samsa has materialized. At least now they no longer believe it is necessary to hide and between Barcelona and Óscar López’s confession they have left us the clarinet. “We are creating a new standard of social democracy,” the great head of the PSOE declared to Canal Zona Roja and everything added up. I am delighted with the revelations, not only because they bring us closer to the always elusive truth, but because they confirm that so many rational social democrats in this country have not moved a hair, we simply witness, stunned and horrified, the ideological pirouettes of Pedro Sánchez.
There were no great European leaders in the red conclave; They sent fifth-rank representatives, I suppose with the instruction not to stand out too much, because we hardly saw them. The headlines were on something else, of course, because Europe is doing a lot right now with the transit through Hormuz and the stalemate of the Ukrainian war, which cannot be forgotten. Here the scene was filled with characters like Lula, Sheinbaum or Petro and it is not necessary to be a lynx of political analysis to realize how far the three are from the concept of European social democracy. On the Barcelona stage there was a mix of left-wing personalist leaderships, national-populisms and other things foreign to strong liberal institutionalism, the social market economy and the Atlantic anchorage that has defined European social democracy.
So yes, they are creating a new standard of social democracy that is not a social democracy but something else. A sentimental thing, apparently. “Democracy means elevating love above hate, cultivating generosity instead of greed, fraternity above war,” the Mexican president said. And you have to be an eight-inch melon not to realize that none of that has to do with the definition of liberal democracy. In any case, we might think, this populist sentimentalism that forgets to appeal to reason is the furthest thing from Western democracy, favorite daughter of the goddess Reason.
Although if it is about being fraternal with one’s own (nepotism version), cultivating generosity with like-minded people (corruption version) and raising love for those who think the same (delegitimizing the adversary) then the majority of those present were probably very cool.
The good side of the story is becoming very difficult for me. So much so that along with the abandonment of practical reason, democratic controls, the independence of powers, institutional containment and so many of its defining notes, it has been joined by protecting dictators. Now it turns out that you can’t insult dictators. The speech of love reaches them fully. So if your people have been jailed, they have forced you into exile and you are prohibited from even entering the European Union, don’t think about failing them, much less failing to respect progressive principles.
Let’s agree that insulting Delcy is the least hundreds of thousands of people can do. They have every right to vent. Let’s see who deprived the exile of calling the little general Paca la Culona, and why demand that they not call the Venezuelan girl cute. From anti-Franco homophobia to Venezuelan racism, the victimized party at least has the right to hate.
Obviously, Sánchez, playing with the international positioning of Spain that he doesn’t give a damn about, was trying to reposition himself. Everything always depends on him. So he played a double trick: that of scratching from the radical and disunited left all the possible votes, all that he will never be able to recover from the center left and the real social democrats, and, as a second option, that of giving himself the appearance of a statesman and international leader in anticipation of what is most likely to happen, that is, that he will lose power. Given that the European chancelleries have already taken notice of him, he only has to invent that international figure capable of fixing world geopolitics from a middle power that does not even want to invest in rearming itself. The sequence Barcelona, China, confrontation with Trump and the United States – as if the country were the ruler – confirm this.
Why fix Spain, which, as a palmero wrote, is too small, if it can fix the world, the UN and the geopolitics of the 21st century? “Qui potest plus, potest minus”, they will think. Or conversely, how if you can’t make the trains work, present budgets, and make sure your people have a place to live, are you going to fix the world, Facundo? How if you don’t respect domestic law are you going to make international law triumph? Well, just as Scheinbaum with love and generosity has destroyed the independent judicial system of his country, he still does not appease the violence of a territory dominated by drug trafficking or intends with a network of roads to end the largest feminicide known in time and volume of murdered women. You have to be very sentimental, not to say deluded, to admit that all this is something more than an enormous performance for the greater glory of the convener. Yes to peace, no to war, but here we come to fight the extreme right, understanding the term to anyone who does not align with us.
Samsa had a problem of not being able to turn around and Spain has the problem of having been left without a progressive liberal democratic party to take to the polls. It is not a minor problem nor does it seem to have a solution unless someone from within, a Hungarian type, puts a remedy to this drift that only benefits Sánchez and destroys the PSOE, which no longer thinks about anything but battles against the right, while leaving the working-class neighborhoods to Vox. The only ones satisfied with this coming out of Sanchismo’s closet are those of us who have not moved from where we were. Little consolation.