Spain does not deserve successive embarrassments that democracy is now suffering inaugurated on December 6, 1978. That law of laws has been maintained with effort by politicians and citizens, obliged by that Constitution to guard the main treasure that was born to bury the effects of the dictatorship. Against the imperatives of that general will that made a clean slate of Franco’s laws, something is currently being exercised that constitutes mockery and contempt for the very foundation of democracy: respect for the law, respect for others.
In recent weeks there have been various events that, far from sowing embarrassment or self-criticism, have been claimed as supposed achievements of the political organizations that have encouraged them. The hot flashes have been successive, as if they were a fine rain that first sows laughter, then bewilderment and, immediately, fear that compliance with the laws will be diluted by that ravine.
The scandal that occurred in Lorca, Murcia, where a large group of ranchers stormed the town hall where the future of a decree to keep farms where pigs are kept away from urban areas, is close in time. That fact was a dangerous attack on the integrity of those gathered and did not find the deserved repudiation by politicians who seemed to attend the disaster as if it were an evil caused by others who were not the assailants. Prisoner of the disastrous mania of seeing the beam in someone else’s eye, the main leader of the opposition explained that he was against the aggression… but in favor of the ranchers. The other party further to the right did not even reach the middle of the repudiation, since it considered that the uprising that led to such an attack responded to the right of ranchers to defend themselves against the attacks they suffer from the current political power.
Shortly after that embarrassing spectacle, pending what the courts rule on the origin and consequences of such a civil disaster, another assault on the virtues with which democracy is adorned took place in the Cortes: nothing less than the sacred legitimacy of a parliamentary vote. In this case, the approval or suspension of the labor reform decree was elucidated, decisive in this legislature and important for Spanish society in the coming decades. In the midst of an impressive outcry, immediately amplified by the networks and the media, without time yet for a calm (and legal) analysis of what happened, the hemicycle was filled with sound and furyas if all of them were right at the same time and none of them saw reason for repentance.
The latter was an episode greater than what Spain deserves. And it is a danger that it is not noticed, on the part of irresponsible politicians and the media that cheer them on, that this is such a delicate situation that a simple match can endanger it. In EL PERIÓDICO, the writer Luis Landero said: «A toxic climate that has been invented to make believe that, in this country, we all hate each other. But I don’t see that on the street. All of us, more or less, are better than what is said.
We are all better… What Spain does not deserve is that those who represent it are capable of endangering a coexistence that is not based only on laws but on pure respect that we all owe. Spain does not deserve this.