Take it out of your head: he’s never going to leave. He’ll stay where he is if the numbers work out, or he’ll wait, holed up in his seat, while others stab each other in the back. Just look at his face: it’s hard to imagine him crying, hugging the presidential desk like a Gypsy family at the coffin of a deceased patriarch. Sánchez hasn’t ceased to be Sánchez. He takes risks because the farce had become unsustainable. He calculated his chances —he’s very good at that— and he knows that the ballot box could let him reset the game and begin anew, just like last time, handing the remnants of the systematic demolition he’s been carrying out of the State to yesterday’s and tomorrow’s allies. Capable of wriggling within a palm’s reach, he still has excellent reflexes and what the Arabs call baraka. He has presided over so many political funerals that funeral homes should grant him a preferred-supplier card.
The problem is that dissolving Parliament does not dissolve the discredit and the mistrust accumulated between the power and the public institutions, admirable when they deliver good news for the Government and wicked, even fascist, when they contradict it. But it’s fair to recall that, despite his universal lack of scruples, Sánchez did not invent that perversity. The PP and PSOE have spent their entire lives practicing the same system with the cynicism of a bishop who criticizes a bingo he attends every night. What happens is that Sánchez has perfected the mechanism like no one, causing us all to wonder as if it were natural where a judge’s breath comes from, who controls the prosecutor, and where this or that TV pundit earns his living. Poisoning everything with traps, discredit, and suspicion until the State, and what it contains, is left as a sad rag.
That is why Núñez Feijóo inspires me with enormous curiosity. Because one thing is swearing on your dead that you will clean the Augean stables, and another is discovering, once inside, that the amassed filth includes tools useful for governing while you paint your face with cement each morning. His party has spent years denouncing the excesses of Sanchismo, the patrimonial conception of power, and practices incompatible with a healthy democracy. Few insightful people deny that. The problem will arise when the same buttons that seemed repugnant when Sánchez pressed them become tempting when they are within reach of his own finger.
Imagine the matter and tremble a little. If Sánchez is pushed aside, Feijóo —possibly with Abascal perched on his shoulder— will cross the door to the Moncloa, sit in the same chair, open the drawers, and find a panoply of legal instruments, political shenanigans, and precedents that until yesterday he would have deemed scandalous. And then something common in our political history could happen: the milongas would begin. You can’t change everything at once; you have to guarantee stability, etc. First the budgets, then the regional elections, then Trump, Putin or Morocco getting in the way. Imagine Vox having him by the reins. And thus, when reviewing appointments, mechanisms, and executive powers, the partners — and Feijóo himself, if he dares — could decide that what is intolerable in socialist hands becomes, under their own control, an indispensable tool to restore normality.
That is the danger, I think. The overused “they did it too” works in Spain as a justification for all political indecency. The crucial moment will come when Feijóo and company — or vice versa — discover that the problem is not manipulating and twisting the levers of the Executive to the point of absurdity, but allowing that the advantages be enjoyed by someone else. In that case, Sánchez would have achieved a victory more lasting than electoral, because his way of understanding power would outlive him, like the late El Cid riding among the Moors in Valencia. Spain is full of reformers who become conservatives when they find a comfortable chair; here the norm is to expel the arsonist but to fill your pockets with his stash of lighters. And the problem with promises is that they last until fulfilling them harms the one who made them, and he decides to postpone it while Spain isn’t ready. But it never is ready, as long as the parasite caste that drains us keeps on cashing in.
Institutions are not there to trust in the goodness of those who govern or want to govern, which is usually a gang of opportunistic scalawags, but to prevent their misdeeds from costing citizens an arm and a leg. Hence the challenge for Feijóo, if he comes to power, is not to place his people where Sánchez’s are — who will do that — nor to replace one party machinery with another — which he will also do — but to accept rules that limit his own governance, establish decent procedures, strengthen the independence of oversight bodies, respect the autonomy of public media, dodge the temptation to govern by decree, and admit that a lost vote or an adverse ruling is not a fascist, Judeo-Masonic, or Moriarty conspiracy. That is regeneration. Replacing the doorplate and announcing a new style while the state’s demolition levers remain on the table is administrative farce.
The ballot boxes are not an industrial laundry. The dirtiest victory Pedro Sánchez could win on the next November 29 would not be to prevail again, but to whoever defeats him, if that happens, adopt his brazen survival manual. If that were the case, in the two preceding legislatures we would not have witnessed a perverse anomaly but a dress rehearsal. What we naïvely believed were isolated maneuvers would, in reality, be a new way of governing; and Feijóo, alone or with others, would not come to close a period of institutional disrepute, but to continue it with the same means and methods. In that scenario, we would simply be changing masters.
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