A decade ago, in 2016, a majority of Spaniards saw how the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. They wondered what could happen on these strange islands that would cause their citizens to hate a supranational – and completely unknown – organization to which no specific evil affecting the lives of people in each of the member states could be attributed. Today, this question has an answer, and the European Union is one of the organizations that has been dragged into a political target by the Spanish far right to promote green policies or place restrictions on the market. In the same year, the same vast majority of Spaniards saw what they saw as an accidental candidate resulting from a republican idea, millionaire Donald Trump, become president of the most powerful and influential country in the Western world. There were memes and jokes, and laughs of cultural superiority: that couldn’t happen here. Today, nine years later, those same angles have hardened to express humility, discomfort and disbelief. Could that happen here?
Perhaps shaken by the sudden awakening – the Brexit victory and the Trump victory were decisions taken by a narrow margin of a majority that had already heralded global social polarisation – these Spaniards may have believed themselves safe from such simplistic prescriptions and immune to a reactionary wave that had managed to skew the agenda and topics of debate and address the faults of democracies and the failures of the welfare state in their favour. Whether extremist ideas came to power or not is the least important thing, what is important is the cultural change and how they raised the flags that found followers. They changed the borders and we were all accepting them as part of a new geography. What was unthinkable is now possible. The question that finds followers is not where we are going and what bright future we see ourselves in, but whose fault it is that we are here. Or how can we return to the box of memories in which some find nostalgia for what was nothing but delay, restriction, and fear. Swamp lovers should know that women have the same rights as women in Saudi Arabia, or the rest of Europe has advanced and grown more than Spain without the use of a leader.