While the map of infected Spain, entirely red due to the high number of daily new coronavirus cases, has become one of the most important media stories across the world and is repeated over and over again in television news around the planet, the Spanish government has decided to counter-programme the debate with something much lighter: the so-called "steak war". Seeing the Spanish prime minister speaking to the media in Lithuania defending the virtues of a medium-rare T-bone is as priceless as it is frivolous no matter how much he would like to put out a fire supposedly lit by his consumer affairs minister, Alberto Garzón, talking about gas emissions and the greenhouse effect and concluding a video - the way politics is performed today, if not in a tweet - by saying: Less meat. More life.
The technique is almost as old as politics itself: if you don't want to talk about one subject, raise another one. And the Euro 2020 football tournament ended as a Spanish national debate on Tuesday night at the moment when Álvaro Morata missed the fourth penalty against Italy and Jorginho scored with the following one. With Spain eliminated from the Wembley final, the way to avoid talking about the coronavirus, about the backward National Security Bill, about the Court of Accounts and so many other issues was to generate a fictitious and soft debate like that of the steaks. And if that stretches out until the last week of July, well, we're already on holiday.
And one wonders - not trying to make a fuss, of course - whether anyone has stopped to reflect on the fact that international tourism for the month of July has already been lost overboard and that, if there is no remedy, then that of August will go the same way. Because France has just advised its citizens against booking holidays in Spain and we do not know how many other countries will join it over the coming days. And the French are the third international market, behind the UK and Germany. It is therefore not a minor thing, nor to be taken lightly. And we are once again witnessing a debate with epidemiologists at the helm, as if politicians are afraid to dip into politics.
The images of Euro 2020 in recent days with stadiums full of spectators without masks on, in the semifinals held in London, make you think of this roller coaster approach to the virus in which each country does what it wants and there is no joint doctrine. Fortunately, the level of vaccination is getting higher and higher and this Thursday it was reported that in Catalonia 43.4% of the population is now fully vaccinated. It’s time to move fast and keep moving fast with the only really effective measure we have against the virus, which is the vaccine. Even at night, as minister Argimon has pointed out.