Times of political upheaval invite experiments. Innovation is necessary, but when it is done with the soda pop of frivolity it runs the risk of aggravating what it is intended to fix. The week has been full of the consequences of experiments that, in some cases, almost cause accidents and, in others, can cause them in the short term. Since 2008, discomfort dominates the public scene because the old does not finish saying goodbye while the new does not finish imposing itself. And this causes a lot of anxiety.
Errors and successes of Sánchez in Algeria
If the gas does not reach Europe through the North, it has to do so through the South. Yes Pedro Sánchez would have said this so simple at some point to explain the turn it has given to foreign policy in the Maghreb, this week’s crisis would not have been as it has been. If he had explained it to the opposition instead of sucking it up, things would not have gotten where they are. Contrary to what the entrenched press and some Vaticanists defend, in this crisis, Algeria does not have the upper hand of gas rather, it is at a moment of maximum weakness due to Putin’s isolation and because the United States, not Trump, has decided that its partner of reference in the area is Morocco. And Germany, Europe, they need gas. So Algeria has no one to sell gas to other than the EU (Italy is a partner, not a competitor, as was shown on Friday) and the gas cannot pass in the short term through any other place than the gas pipeline reopened in Morocco. White and bottled. With everything going for him, Sánchez turns a bold play into a muddy mess, in which he is more comfortable.
Gabriel Rufián has always been presented as an experiment in the laboratories of politics. It is as true as it is unfair. Those who promoted him did so because they saw him as the stereotype that they claimed to fight politically, the integrated charnego. Rufián has always known how to exploit that profile to establish himself in independence, but he has never given up what he really is, heir to the losers of the war (right or left) who took economic refuge in Catalonia and felt comfortable while the winners moved to Madrid. Vicenç Villatoro explains it very well in the biography of his grandfather. For Rufián, the Catalan right is not different from the Spanish, just as for Puigdemont, the Spanishism of the left is the same as that of the right. That’s why they don’t swallow. Y that’s why his tweets raise great passions even if they end up in a glass of water. Rufián is too eager to treat him as a stereotype by his party, the last is to send him to the municipal offices in Santa Coloma, and Puigdemont has too many companies that consider that the Republican is not worthy of Catalonia because he lacks surnames.
However, the great experiment of the moment in Catalonia is taking place in the field of communication. The story is almost a 20th century joke. Go a communications entrepreneur ruined by DTT and enriched by the sale of pizzas in New York, a gambling businessman well treated by Pujolism and a conspicuous constitutionalist investor and they bought the only private television concession in Catalonia from the Godó group, rented a network of radio stations to the reference media group of the Spanish left and hired a digital newsroom with journalists labeled in one way or another. And the project is sold to politicians as a big business that will sink public television by staging debates like Save me between independentists and non-independentists. And the politicians go and they believe it, they facilitate the changes of ownership of the concessions and they promise advertising investment. That the unrepentant independence supporters and the constitutionalist sympathizers of Vox stir these waters, it can be understood. That the forces that have committed themselves to the agenda of the reunion, to the dialogue table or to removing Laura Borràs from the controls is already more surprising. One day they will learn that they did not win or lose the elections because of TV3 but because of failed experiments.