If you delve into the CIS barometers, you can see that since the democratic recovery There have been more citizens who have felt satisfied with the functioning of the democratic system than those who thought the opposite: this is the case from the beginning of the 1980s until 2010. That is when The effects of the economic crisis are beginning to be felt –which also has its political and territorial vector– and there is no turning back from disaffection. Moreover, focusing on the Catalan case, for which we have a solid historical series, maintaining a feeling of detachment It is obvious. Until 2008, and in a sustained manner, more than 60% of those surveyed by the ICPS expressed their satisfaction with the functioning of the democratic system, a figure that fell in 2009-2010 and consolidated its decline in 2012, standing at a residual 20% without Almost fluctuations.
The Great Recession meant an increase in poverty and inequality, generating more fractured, unequal and segregated societies. The economic crisis, and above all its ‘austericidal’ management, brought with it an increase in citizens’ distrust of institutions and political actors. But also increased interest in politics and propensity to participate. Thus, social unrest was channeled in part with an inclusive horizon of hope. Hence the 15-M and the materialization of Podemos and various municipal candidates. More equality, more freedom and more fraternity… a response that delved into the genuine values of modernity. These experiences acted at the same time as a vaccine against the growth of the radical right.
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Then came the economic recovery: The improvements in the macroeconomic indicators represented a certain social relief, although vulnerable and precarious balances were maintained in broad social sectors. Too many people on the tightrope. The pandemic hit this reality. And, more intuitively than ideologically, the hegemonic parameters shifted with respect to those that had been consolidated since the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher: the limits of neoliberalism were shown and the need to move towards a return to the public – the state and the community. A turn that required a certain time for results to begin to be seen. The war comes to interrupt this construction of a sort of social Europe.
And the challenge today is great. We start from Significant levels of citizen dissatisfaction that can be made worse by the effects of the war in Ukraine. The possibility of widespread impoverishment, the breakdown of cohesion and the destruction of employment, especially in small and medium-sized companies, it is a plausible reality if the states and European institutions do not intervene actively in the short term (intervention in the electricity market, ambitious tax reform, protection of citizens and SMEs, etc.). We must be clear that, or there is profound answers that go to the root of the problems, or exits to despair have all the numbers to be reactive. The real danger of quietism today moves us to the destruction of the very ideals of modernity. To a kind of less freedom, less equality, less fraternity.