The Pedro Sánchez government has got us so used to its habit of not telling the truth that we are now taking for granted that this is what politics consists of: saying one thing and doing the opposite. The Spanish prime minister has become accustomed like no other country's governor to the coronavirus crisis, and his already-regular appearances on television have become interminable expositions of obviousness, and above all, of self-praise. They also have three more characteristics: a false appearance of the inevitability of decisions, leading to an insistence that Spain is doing as advised by the experts, the WHO, the UN or some other international body; a series of financial promises that never quite see the light of day since Spain finds itself in an alarming economic situation; and finally, the repetition of ideas which are completely false but which, from behind the Spanish government lectern, are transformed into irrefutable truths. Yesterday's case of the false OECD ranking that placed Spain as the eighth-best country in the world in number of Covid-19 tests - when the correct position was 17th - is another example of how a lie can be spread over and over again without as much as a blush.
The fallacious path towards the "new normality" which Pedro Sánchez outlined resembles nothing so much as a journey into the unknown. His proposal is to extend the state of alarm for a minimum of six more weeks and a maximum of eight and, from there, improvise patch-ups to carry out what he calls "an orderly de-escalation" which will be by provinces and will be piloted from Madrid. Above all, the slightest odour of the autonomous communities must be avoided and the single command in charge of the deconfinement process must continue in the hands of the Spanish government. The work of several decades by different autonomous communities in putting territorial health maps into order is literally tossed into the garbage, because unification must now take place based on the provinces.
Spain is heading for economic ruin but will march there in as unified a fashion as possible. Under the state of alarm decree, the PSOE has given itself powers and attributions that it seemed only a PP government could assume via the application of article 155. Of course, now, unlike when the Catalan government was sacked in 2017 and its parliament closed up, there is an executive at the head of the Catalan institutions, but its functions, in practice, are worthless. If a Catalan government is unable to make any decision about the coronavirus, the gravest possible situation for its citizens, can it even be considered to be a government?
Sánchez and Iglesias have tied down the autonomous communities and reduced their real powers to a minimum and this should be a concern not only for Catalonia. In the Basque Country almost the same thing is happening. And the huge paradox is that in order to govern Spain, the government of Sanchez and Iglesias needs the nationalist and the pro-independence parties to win any parliamentary vote. Is it so hard to see the outcome that they have prepared for us?