Understand the sequence well. At midday on the 25th, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the CIG group launched and continued its demonstration in the streets of Santiago in front of the headquarters of the local People’s Party – the headquarters near Zara, because … To get to the regional area, you have to go to San Lazaro, and it gets out of hand – to the point of needing police intervention so things don’t get out of hand.
It’s strange, because everyone on this ideological spectrum is pretty much feminist – and shares the virtuous Galician card that nationalism sells – unless the woman in question is from the Popular Party. The reason is simple and understandable: the right and extreme right are not citizens whose rights can be recognized.
This is not the opinion of Law No. 1/2004 regarding comprehensive protection measures against sexual violence, which considers “threat and coercion” also an expression of this scourge that we want to combat. They have something of their own, listen: they pretend to be the most feminist in the world but raise and chant outdated masculine slogans against the workers at the headquarters of the People’s Party and Chancellor Fabiola García.
We wouldn’t be surprised at this point either. This is the same CIG that distributed in San Cayetano that shameful brochure in which the physical appearance of Fabiola García and the alleged desire to go to sales instead of working in its department, the Ministry of Social Policy, were trivial. Over the course of weeks, Anna Ponton was asked, both positively and negatively, to condemn this action by the trade union arm of Nationalism. There is no news.
The stereotyping of women into superficial dolls is one practice that has been boldly pointed out as sexist and heteropatriarchal, regardless of the evidence. Unless the person implementing it is the Citizenship and Gender Equality Commission, in which case no woman from the national sphere – all of them feminists – will stand for chancellor. Inés Rey, the socialist mayor of La Coruña, did so, which embarrassed many New Patriotic Party voters.
And now, after the riots in front of the local headquarters of the People’s Party in Santiago, the ominous silence of nationalism, which sees nothing wrong with this type of practice, has returned. There’s Goretti Sanmartin, who said: “It’s not a big deal.” He must be waiting to light the container on fire. Although it’s better not to, because given how the garbage service works in the Galician capital, the churroscado plastic stays there for eight months, generating an unhealthy ecosystem. Not to mention that there were no firefighters to put out the fire.
Sensitivities aside, the CIG’s response is neither a provocation nor a last-minute warm-up, but rather bears all the hallmarks of a deliberate response. It seems that the National Headquarters is breathing from the wound that the People’s Party has opened in recent months. First, there was the doctrinal content of the teaching modules sent to teachers, then their guide to striking for days paid from the “Resistance Fund,” and finally, the roadmap for deliberately fomenting a climate of social conflict. Shake the tree, see if the Natural Gas Party can pick up the nuts, electorally speaking.
The CIG, and by extension, suffers from political nationalism, which is seen as lost in its own ideological maze. The BNG went so far as to register an illegal motion in Parliament for discussion in plenary where Paula Prado was urged to “correct her statements” and asked to “publicly apologise” for her criticism of the educational modules published by the CIG, which the union denied authoring but admitted to hosting on its website.
The People’s Party rubs its hands as its strategy of condemning the Emperor’s nudity is paying off, as it shouts and hurls insults at whoever it points out. And the whole of Galicia notices how those who were called upon to be the alternative at some point, spend their money, which every time moves a little further, one flag after another.