For forty years I've seen governments pass through this country like buses. Some dirtier than others, some with a seized engine, most with the driver looking in the rearview mirror instead of at the road. And yet, here we are. Sitting at the stop, ticket in hand, convinced that the next one will be the right one.
It won't be.
Spain has the unique talent of turning any crisis into a spectacle, and any spectacle into routine. What would cause immediate resignations in another country here generates press conferences. What would cause embarrassment there results in a trending topic for forty-eight hours and then silence. Great silence. The complicit silence of those who no longer expect anything and therefore demand nothing.
The problem isn't that we are poorly governed. The problem is that we have become accustomed to it.
I've seen how the left forgot about workers to talk about other things, undoubtedly important things, but things that don't pay the mortgage. I've seen how the right, that right that boasts of homeland and flag, had no qualms about making deals with anyone necessary to regain a warm seat. And I've seen the ordinary citizen — that man who wakes up early, pays his taxes, takes his children to public school because he can't afford private — watching the news with that expression of astonishment and resignation that best defines contemporary Spanish condition.
Meanwhile, Congress debates. Always debates. Debates with fervour, with passion, with insults measured to the millimetre so they don't cross the line. Debates and debates and in the end, of course, approves nothing. Or approves something that is useless. Or whatever it approves is overturned by the one next to it. It's a perfect mechanism, if you think about it: a machine designed with Swiss precision to produce absolutely nothing.
And in the meantime, the people.
The people who can't make ends meet even though they work. The young people who studied what they were told to study and now have a master's degree, two languages, and an internship contract at thirty-two. The older people who contributed for forty years and now look at their pension with the same distrust one looks at a broken umbrella before going out into the rain. Those people don't appear on talk shows. They don't generate headlines. They have no spokesperson or communication office.
Those people simply exist, and wait.
What angers me the most — and at this point in life, few things can truly anger me, because one becomes hardened — is not the corruption. Corruption is as old as power, and power is as old as man. What angers me is the naturalness with which it is exercised. The comfort. That way of looking at the camera and lying without blinking, with the ease of someone who has been doing it for so long that they no longer even notice. Like breathing. Like getting up in the morning.
They say that people have the governments they deserve. I don't fully believe that. I believe that people have the governments they are allowed to have. That there is a difference. But I also believe that at a certain point, passivity becomes complicity. And that staying on the sofa every time there is an opportunity to demand accountability is a silent but effective way of signing a blank cheque.
This country has a solution. I truly believe it, even if it sometimes costs me.
But it won't have one as long as we continue applauding the usual bad one for being less bad than the other. As long as we confuse managing disaster with governing. As long as we accept that mediocrity is the inevitable price of democracy, when in reality it is the consequence of not demanding more.
The bus will arrive. It will arrive dirty, late, and with the driver talking on the phone.
The question is whether we get back on.
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