A confronted government and, therefore, useless

No government is prepared to live in perpetual crisis. This, from what you see, even to lead the management of an exceptional but expected snowfall. The government of Pedro Sanchez It was designed thinking about neutralizing Podemos and that the PSOE would recover the condition of the hegemonic party of the left, driving away the risk of surprise and returning Pablo Iglesias to the niche they occupied in their day Julio Anguita. And Sanchez was in it, reconquering the Galapagar spaces from the pre-Suresnes orthodoxy, when the very professional exercise of serial fiction designed by Redondo To turn the master into a world leader, the harsh reality came upon him, the day to day, the unforeseen or whatever the hell you want to call what the bloody life itself has been.

If anything has become clear in this long year of irregular coexistence, it is that populism is a permanent source of instability and a productive factory of inefficiency.

Until the annoyance of the pandemic, things were running as planned for Sánchez: the dire situation of the opposition, and the setback of Podemos in the November 2019 elections, made the failure of the PSOE, according to the expectations that served to justify the electoral repetition, in an opportunity to address the great national agreement that this country has pending. However, the mousetrap intelligence of the magician from La Moncloa prevailed over what in other more refined latitudes would have called common sense. In such a way that what we had for breakfast on December 30 of that year was with the announcement of a progressive coalition express that, being in reality the forced exercise – not forced – of two losers, it was presented to us by the emergency route, without giving the option of any internal debate, as one of those historical turns that must be used to build a splendid future .

What remains of the ‘Robin Hood vallecano’

What the signatories of an inconvenient pact could not foresee, but of mutual convenience, is that after a little more than a year of that compromise, which surprised Tyrians and Trojans, to Bald, Lastras and Open them, already half a civilized world, is that an inopportune traveling companion called covid-19 was going to shamelessly bare the country’s structural weaknesses, abruptly altering the pyramid of priorities and needs, and displacing the formidable social agenda from the list of newscasts that was preparing the most progressive of the governments of the planet. Still, with its extraordinary capacity for adaptation, the president’s imaginative team set itself the task of converting, with commendable propaganda display, the disaster in opportunity. Objective, by the way, not yet ruled out. Miracles of resilience (and of the occupation of the information space).

The crudest showdown is between those who still have a lot to lose and those who have far surpassed their level of incompetence.

It happens, however, that if something has become clear in this long year of irregular coexistence, it is that populism, represented by a sector of the Ministerial Cabinet, is not only a permanent source of instability, but above all a productive factory of incompetence. Incompetence, by the way, that the propaganda not only fails to cover up, but accentuates, as it takes away huge resources from other management areas, although we are not always able to notice it. Incompetence in part derived from the effort of impossible conciliation to which Sánchez submits the two tribes of his Government. Because no matter how much they dress it as an exemplary model of contrast of opinion, the reality, always the stubborn reality, is that a team in which there is no possibility of understanding on basic issues such as the State model, the master lines of an economic policy compatible with the demands of Brussels, or the very relevant issue of the distribution of European funds, it is not a team. A two-faced government faced on issues such as the reform of pensions, taxation, parliamentary monarchy, the priorities in foreign policy and even in equality policies, it is not a government.

This is a useless government not because it does not have some managers of proven capacity, but because it is not the one that, at this juncture, the country needs. It can hold out for a long time, because its leaders do not seem very supportive of self-destruction, but it is useless. Not even the most benevolent plot hypothesis for Sánchez, the one that projects outward a noble internal pulse between pragmatists and populists, already conceals the weakness of a Cabinet whose most reliable actors are subjected to permanent revisionist scrutiny, and in which the true confrontation occurs between those who still have much to lose – or to gain (Calvin, Escrivá O Robles) -, and those others who live by counterprogramming the aforementioned (and maintaining that pose, already implausible, of Robin Hood vallecano), showing, day in and day out, to have far exceeded his level of incompetence (The Peter Principle).

The postscript

I transcribe below, for those who continue to relativize the seriousness of the assault on the Capitol, the message of a good friend who knows what he is talking about, alarmed at so much forgetfulness: “Much analyst in the pages of the press talking about the assault on the US Capitol and none recall the long fascist and pro-Nazi tradition of a section of American society. Roosevelt they were seen and desired to enter the Second World War. Henry Ford He was a Nazi and financed the German Nazi Party, and if the Japanese do not attack Pearl Harbor, which the American Secret Service knew, they still take longer to fight Hitler. Trump It is neither circumstantial nor the result of chance. McCarthy neither was it ”.

Said it remains.