The reformist Spain

The Spanish political parties have amply shown their resignation to obtain constitutional political agreements to face the national, European and international challenges for those who have never had and will not have sufficient political strength, although sometimes they have achieved more baggy majorities than today more distrustful citizens than in past times . We have come to the polls four times in five years and our politicians have failed to manage our will with prudence and height, expressed clearly in the successive elections. Procrastination, ambition, stunning, sectarianism and personal rancor have been passions that have prevented them from reasonably managing our decisions. The more our Transition politicians speak, the more they mention Suárez , González , Carrillo or Fraga , the less effort they make to cross the reduced and comfortable borders of their respective acronyms. They settle for shouting more, with dividing by mitosis, as if it were amoebas; with exaggeration, with offering a little more than the opposite, without taking into account the capabilities of our nation and avoiding the responsibility they incur when they offer to represent us. Despite the strenuous efforts of politicians to achieve our inhibition - it seems that it cannot be done so badly involuntarily -, I will not give up the right to vote , which seems like the finishing touch of my citizenship.

Perhaps remembering my old political activity and prompted by the proximity of new elections, I cannot help expressing my idea of a better, more internally vertebrate Spain and with more strength to face the challenges that will place us, if they have not already done so, in the dilemma of returning to the isolated tail car or placing ourselves among the most prosperous countries. We will achieve this desirable and possible Spain with politicians who exercise their responsibility, knowing that if they do not face it, others will come who will develop more aggressive, populist and nationalist policies of various kinds. Reformism is a mood, a moderate and optimistic way of seeing public space, in permanent combat against resignation . It implies courage to deny improvisations and to undertake the policies that a changing society requires; It is a responsibility to say and do what he might not do, nor would a citizen say in his private life. Being a reformist means relativizing the reasons that differentiate you from your opponents to seek points of agreement , it means having enough intelligence to know that we do not have to start again continuously and that we must not terminate what has been achieved. It also means defending the Constitution of 78, but not making it an immutable Egyptian hieroglyph . He proposes us to try to create a secular and republican patriotism from the Magna Carta of 78, is to feel the symbols of our nation without the need to use them against anyone . It is to face all those, to the right and to the left, who on so many occasions have made us fail with the best intentions and the worst results. Their thinking, their ideas, overflow the narrow margins of neoliberal ideologues who write on blank sheets as if circumstances, chance, birth in a particular place or in a specific family did not unfairly influence the vital development of people. He also feels imprisoned with the proposals of the neo-communists, too simple for the times we have had to live, and that acquire greater prestige in Europe as time darkens the memory of the tragedies they caused in the twentieth century. To be a reformist in Spain today is to flee from the ghosts of the past, from the ambitious sectarianism, from the ideological stereotypes of the twentieth century and is to understand the future as the opportunity to carry out a peaceful political adventure .

The reformer tends to value for himself the circumstances that surround him, has the courage to part with ideological or religious clichés and abominates policies that are based exclusively on the identity of any kind because they break the public space that forges the fundamental citizen consensus . In fact, it connects with the Enlightenment by losing the fear of elaborating its own judgments and partly renouncing them in the search for agreements that organize a plural and harmonious social life. He does not oppose globalization , nor do he paralyze the profound changes that we live, he has the immense task of managing it with the serenity that the irrefutable fact of knowing that we have always been able to manage the news and take advantage of them to make economic progress , socially and morally.

Seeing Spain today, the reformer would exercise his critical spirit by highlighting that 40 years of concessions, of acting as if we owed the nationalists something , of relating to them as if we were guilty even of their personal misfortunes, have only managed to embolden them and that behave out of all citizen responsibility. He knows that the incipient independence terrorism in Catalonia has nothing to do with what we met and suffered for tens of years starring ETA , but sees a very serious danger in the protection of Catalan institutions to these terrorist actions, aborted by the Civil Guard, and Guess that institutional irresponsibility will generate a state of anomie that sooner or later will be expressed in an increase in crime or in a terrorist action with a chance to take root. The reformer knows that legal and citizen security are the basis and guarantee of a free society and that his absence is the most disadvantaged to the most disadvantaged. It would not make article 155 of the Constitution an electoral flag , it would require the rest of the constitutional parties a common diagnosis and an action agreed in Catalonia, facing independence from an immovable policy, regardless of who governs.

The reformer does not share the goodism of those who propose bridges to solve migrations caused by misery or religious, political or identity repressions. He also knows that in the face of human despair there are no sufficiently solid walls that prevent the massive and dramatic escape of those who see a promising world nearby. It analyzes the integration capacity of the society in which it lives and would require the European Union to make an effort proportional to the tragedy, which of course consists of economic aid, but also a political and moral control of the leaders of those countries. If one does not act with responsibility and courage, fear, insecurity, indifference or goodism will put the governance of this great challenge in the hands of those who believe that everything will be solved with walls or bridges.

The reformer sees in the European Union a great opportunity to be protagonists of history as we have been in the last 2,000 years . The European Union represents a great hope of political, economic, cultural and social agreement, carried out in peaceful and free ways, by acts of free freedom of its members. The culmination of this political adventure, unknown in history, would be the best example, the most excellent representation of civilization. But it is that becoming one more subject of international political action is not an option, it is an imperative need if we continue to be a center of economic, cultural and ethical progress. In the case of failure, each country on its own would cease to be relevant in the face of the emergence of great nations that already take the lead in economic and scientific fields, although some of them lack freedom or have not been able to extract from maximum poverty to large sectors of its population. They are appearing with force and legitimacy forms of iliberal, populist government , who despise democratic conventions and exhibit for fear of the future that a nationalist protectionism knocks at our door, and in the face of that dehumanized alternative is that of the Union, based on the Humanism, individual freedom, solidarity and representative democracy. Wow, this great adventure is worth it!

Education , the demographic crisis , climate change , endemic unemployment that affects the youngest ... there are so many challenges that are planted in the eyes of the reformists! All difficult, all exciting; also all with possibilities of solution using reason and a moderate temper that moves us away from those extremes that caused so much misfortune in the past. We are very close to the elections , look at the kind readers who are closer to this sketch as incomplete as inaccessible to the reformer and act accordingly, casting their vote, because that brave and generous Spain exists, we only need to favor its appearance . That complete Spain, without amputations, capable of looking at a future that has knocked down our door with thunder because it feels pride and affection for the pages it has written in the history of humanity, is there.

Nicolás Redondo Terreros is a member of the Editorial Board of EL MUNDO.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Spain
• European Union
• Catalonia
• Civil Guard
• Europe
• ETA
• World

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