This is starting to be a recurring thing: we listen to an appearance of Pedro Sanchez and, from a certain point, one wonders who he can address. Or, more precisely, what type of voter is intended to convince or reassure the argument put forward on this occasion. Last week, without going any further, the president responded to the controversy caused by the Salazar affair insisting on the fact that “feminism gives us lessons”, lessons which he says he accepts with humility. And we wonder who the Moncloa writers were thinking of when they prepared this message. The president of the government, supposedly the most feminist in history, would admit that, until a few weeks ago, he did not know that complaints of sexual harassment should not be ignored or even attempted to be buried. Who was supposed to stay calm after hearing that?
Sánchez’s appearance on Monday, however, did not raise this type of doubt. It was clear that his speech could only be addressed to voters who had not opened a newspaper for a few weeks, without listening to the radio, without watching television (or only a very specific channel), without accessing social networks and without even reading messages from their WhatsApp groups. Only in this way can we understand that Sánchez argued that “systemic corruption, that which affected the entire democratic system of our country, ended with the departure of the Popular Party from the Spanish government in 2018”. Because if something becomes clear with the succession of reports, arrests and searches in recent weeks, it is that corruption has not been banished from our system in 2018. The replacement of the Popular Party by the PSOE and its partners has only given birth to new groups taking advantage of the levers of power to enrich themselves fraudulently. And we are not talking about cases that affect minor positions, marginal ministries or minority groups. In the various investigations, for the moment, a Minister of Development, an organizational secretary of the PSOE and a former president of the SEPI are involved; Not to mention several ministries and public companies. Wouldn’t these types of conspiracies be considered “systemic corruption”?
Reality exceeds Moncloa’s capacity to produce discursive phantasmagorias, even if these no longer aim to convince or mark the public debate, but only to get out of it. The arguments themselves evoke what they seek to frighten. It is even difficult to hear Sánchez call for “the public” without thinking of the very particular advantage that several people who owed him this position would have obtained in recent years. We thus return to the idea that a Government can have of the voters to whom these messages are addressed. It’s possible that many have spent a few weeks disconnected from the news, but it’s hard to think that they will continue in a self-inflicted blackout until 2027. Although it is true – for both César and César – that Sánchez’s entire career so far has been based on a very defined assumption about what his voters wanted to hear. And also what they could accept. We will soon see if this hypothesis is still correct.
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