Spain is a sick country

Last Saturday, around nine in the morning, for almost an hour on Cadena Ser, broadcast by radio for all of Spain, I made the superhuman effort to listen to a program on the relevance of girls’ skirts in schools. The pedagogue specialist in skirts, encouraged by the journalist, developed a whole theory about “the discriminatory bias of skirts” because they generated a differentiation between boys and girls that violated equality and made it difficult to play games and sports at recess.

The conclusion of the radio show was that the best thing was to make the use of pants mandatory for all children in schools, whether public, arranged or private. After wasting my time listening to the pedagogues and the journalist, I came to the conclusion that Spain is a sick country.

A country that does not know where it is or where it is going. A country that wastes its energies in sterile and surreal debates. A country in which Congress is more of a neighborhood chicken coop than a respected and respectable institution. A country that has the governing body of the Judiciary blocked, as it is the last area in which the absolute power of the party leaderships is resolved.

How did we get here? The answer, with regard to the political leadership of Spain since 1977, is that, together with great successes (such as the operation of the Democratic Transition), the presidents of Government have monopolized a power that does not correspond to them and have emptied into as much as possible the checks and balances of powers, which is something they loathe.

All the presidents of the Government since 1977 have been and are more heirs of the Franco regime (caudillismo) than of the respectful tradition with the political adversary and with the institutions of the time of the Restoration of 1876.

Reading the numerous bibliography and articles on the chronic crisis of the poor functioning of our democracy, one can see a growing knowledge of the problems, the disease, and the Spanish political system. Fortunately, there is no appeal in opinion to a iron surgeon. Experience has taught us that the beginning of the breakdown of constitutional legality leads us sooner or later to civil strife.

We need a humanist doctor, in the style of a gift Gregorio Marañónthat he is capable of making a diagnosis and that he proposes urgent remedies to heal what is already known in Spain as the “sick of Europe”.

On Monday, in ABC, Pablo Abejas Juarez recommended in an article, whose reading I strongly recommend, that a new parliamentary majority, without the need to reform the Constitution, can address reforms through organic laws. There are three proposals that would lead to the “reunification of Spain”: a Spanish law, a new electoral law and the reform of the Council of the Judiciary.

I share the diagnosis and reformist idea of ​​Mr. Abejas Suárez, but allow me to add a couple of observations. The partitocratic drift that we suffer makes it essential to reform the law on political parties, its consolidation system in the control of the organization and its excessive public financing.

In addition, the partisan fight of the headquarters of the PP of Genoa and of the PSOE of Ferraz turns the voters of the rest of the provinces into mere servants to obtain a majority in Congress. The effective representation of the interests of the provinces and regions is subsumed to Madrid with the objective of conquering that precious object of desire that is Moncloa.

For this reason, more and more new provincial electoral initiatives arise outside the headquarters of the PP and the PSOE. This has been revealed Estefania Molina in a recent and interesting article on The country which I also recommend.

Spain suffers from partitocracy, lack of representation and we endure an excess of bizarre politicians like Puigdemont. Being sick is a transitory situation that has a remedy as long as the diagnosis is correct and the cure is addressed. The opposite is the worsening of the sick that we have suffered since 2004, and that it is time to heal.

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