A leopard doesn't change its spots. I am one of the legion of analysts who have always thought that the Spanish prime minister is an excellent tactical politician, ruthless when it comes to breaking his commitments and capable of going back on his word as many times as necessary. The amnesty is the clearest example. As he himself recognized last October, in the Socialist (PSOE) party's federal committee meeting, when defending the amnesty for the Catalan pro-independence leaders prosecuted for the independence process, the time had come to “make a virtue of necessity”, since it was the only way for a new government to be formed and a repeat election avoided. So we'll just make a couple of minor corrections to our discourse... and hey, presto. That PSOE general secretary who had, together with Mariano Rajoy, led the application of Article 155 and the suppression of the Catalan government in 2017, transformed himself into the battering ram who would get the amnesty approved. For an office? Yes. For an office. Is that politics? Yes. It's politics.
For this reason, when he solemnly announced last Wednesday that he was taking a period of five days to reflect on whether it was worth continuing, due to the attacks he had received and the fact that his wife, Begoña Gómez, appeared implicated in corruption cases, and that a Madrid judge had opened a case against her as a person under investigation, I had no doubt that it was just another manoeuvre of his. The passing of the days, the silence that surrounded this reflection, the demonstrations of support from across the Socialist party, the organizing of the visit to the king on Monday morning to inform him of the decision, convinced me that, perhaps yes, this time the person had displaced the politician. Something that he himself defined as love. Or, that compelling reasons, which we might gradually be told about, had led him to leave the Moncloa palace.
But no. That was a false understanding of reality. He had managed to deceive us once again and after dramatizing it with indisputable success - newspapers took his departure for granted and live talk shows were narrating his farewell and categorically declaring that he was leaving in an extraordinary kind of public mourning - the tactical genius revealed his latest magic trick: I'm staying. He had suffered a blow and had already overcome it. "La España de charanga y pandereta" - "The Spain of party band and tambourine", as the famous poem El mañana efímero by Antonio Machado begins, embodied in a gesture, an attitude, a farce. Pedro Sánchez had drawn us all in like fools, while the usual choirs - on Sunday, even the theatrical world of the Almodóvar generation, from whom we had not known anything for some time - asked him to continue, since only he, it seemed, could save Spanish democracy.
Pedro Sánchez had drawn us all in like fools, while the usual choirs - on Sunday, even the theatrical world of the Almodóvar generation - asked him to continue, since only he, it seemed, could save Spanish democracy
It is very easy this Monday to be minimally critical of the president's decision, which may have pleased his own people but leaves a trail of inconsistencies that are difficult to understand for others. You have to be of a certain age, surely, to remember the episodes of prime ministers cornered by the opposition, the media and what is understood as the "deep state" who have suffered similar, or even worse, harassment. To begin with, Adolfo Suárez, in 1981. In the actions of the PSOE of that time there are still dark episodes surrounding the figure of former general Alfonso Armada, the most important of which is that of a famous dinner in Lleida in the weeks before the attempted coup d'état of 23-F. That must have been truly hard. And when Suárez was asked if he should continue, he answered: "I do not want the democratic system of coexistence to be, once again, a parenthesis in the history of Spain." And he left.
Forty-three years later, the country has certainly changed. But seeing the sad circus of these days, the abuse of the institutions and the prime time soap opera that they have seen fit to show us from Madrid, with an air more typical of a Venezuelan telenovela than a serious democracy, the only conclusion is that the change produced has been for the worse. I once read that an experiment had been carried out in several countries on professional actors and that the conclusion was that actors almost never feel the emotions of the character they represent. No matter what the emotions were, on stage they always appeared as a game or a fantasy. The Moncloa very much deserves to be added to the theatre listings in Madrid because the production of Sánchez, stay is bound to outlast even the successful La madre que me parió -"The mother who gave birth to me"- which is being performed at the Teatro Larra in its seventh season with a plotline that is far from light: if you want to know who you are marrying, make sure you really get to know your mother-in-law.