Authoritarian cynicism triumphs because liberal hypocresy hesitates over words before abandoning them. For years, democracies that proclaimed themselves feminist, guarantor or exemplary have preserved the vocabulary of values while liberating their content. It is in this shade that an unmasked authoritarianism flourished which today displays its cynicism as if it were a form of sincerity. It is in this context that the PSOE’s #MeToo is breaking today: the public breaking of a pact of silence which leaves the party exposed precisely in what it has decided to embody. When Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office and Trump says “you can call me a fascist, nothing happens”, he shows exactly that: the irrelevance of the moral category as a restriction. When Elon Musk calls for the abolition of the EU after a fine and responds “pretty much” to a meme showing the European flag transformed into evasion, he operates in the same register: provocation without cost, the exposure of what was until then hidden. Only the Pole Radoslaw Sikorski dared to name it: “Go to Mars. There is no censorship of Nazi salutes.” This response is perhaps the most interesting that Europe has given to this crisis. But you are exceptional precisely because you name what others avoid naming.
Contemporary authoritarianism does not need to be hidden because of the liberal hypocresy of previous works: it leaves without moral anchor the terms with which it could previously be condemned. The cynicism of authoritarian law parasitizes the moral void of liberalism. In this context, this is better understood than what #MeToo del PSOE supposes. It is not just an internal scandal or a management crisis: it is the irruption of a language which comes to mean something even though it seemed to have become vacant. #MeToo is not strong enough to reveal strangers – many people knew that – but because it breaks the pact of silence that prevented knowing them. Transformed rumors into accusations and the private into public responsibility. I found the political strength to speak the truth out loud.
The PSOE did not speak only for the cases that shake it today, but for something deeper: to believe that the fleece is enough. Preserving the appearance of morality without transforming power structures. Convert feminism into references and not into practice; in a currency and not in an effective protection mechanism. Confusing institutionalization and victory. Traditional elites do not understand that the situation has changed. They continue to believe that the denunciation of hypocresy is a universal weapon, without seeing that the other gang has abandoned all moral pretensions and is therefore immune to this type of accusation. We have seen it in Gaza and in so many other crises: the language of values is maintained while the content is empty. If there are human rights, do the opposite, until words lose their ability to name. This obscene distance between speech and reality feeds the broth in which Trump and his equivalents thrive. Nothing came of it. Born from the gap between promise and reality, from this abyss between what happens and what liberalism dares to decide. This is where this #MeToo becomes more than an internal crisis in the PSOE: it becomes the shadow of a deeper political agony. A democracy can resist the noise of its scandals, but not the silence of its truths.
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