Tell me a story

It has been the summer of the story. From the battle of the story. The summer snake is the snake of the story.

They explained headlines and substitutes of all sensitivities: after the failed investiture of Pedro Sánchez, parties and leaders struggled to give and win "the battle of the story . " The unanimous and simultaneous application of this angry crutch is suspicious, replicated by the commentators with the satisfaction of the insider: it sounds too much like a cabinet. Transmission as a substitute for information. Five years of career for this.

But what do they talk about when they talk about the story? The story of what? Of what happened before and after July 25, when Sanchez's failure to obtain the confidence of the Congress of Deputies to be invested president of the Government was certified on second vote. The battle of the story would be, then, the set of communicative skirmishes with which to counteract the propaganda device arranged from La Moncloa to justify Sanchez's willingness to govern alone, which today seems nothing more than a prolonged dilatory maneuver to charge of the budget and general credulity on the way to new elections.

Each one of the actors of the political blockade has prepared a story with which to consolidate their position and demonstrate their irresponsibility, that is, their innocence, before the presumed fiasco of the electoral repetition. These stories have in common discursive indigence and rarely pass the argumentation test. They are not, of course, dialectical. They circulate through reality without touching it, ignoring everything that is inconvenient to the interests of those who have put them in circulation. Its content is poured into public opinion as a finished and immiscible product, battleship before the replica, dignified by the biased comment of the specialists. These stories cross each other in parallel planes. The encounter is impossible , and that impossibility is part of its nature and determines its effectiveness, as understood by those who have designed them.

With the proverbial discipline of a century-old brand, spokesmen and ministers spread without weakening - conviction is fundamental, and Vice President Calvo is an exemplary model of conviction - the socialist hypothesis. The idea is to make reasonable the expectation that Sanchez is president in an unusual and unprecedented minority, claiming the unconditional support of his left-wing allies and the responsible abstention of PP and Citizens, which must be offered for self-castration because, simply, It is not your time. The culprits that this ideal hypothesis does not get ahead are, therefore, a Pablo Iglesias obstinate since 2016 in bursting governments of progress and a right installed in institutional disloyalty and determined not to give up its attributes.

Given the socialist account, Citizens appears infected with contempt for the facts but with great formal vigor. Since the electoral night Albert Rivera has become the leader of the opposition because yes. Driven, almost propelled by a voluntarist inertia that Inés Arrimadas would have wanted after his historic victory in the Catalan regional 2017, Rivera claims for his party the condition of a new hegemonic brand of the right center without anything but his mood endorses similar claim. The recent history - the investor agreement of PSOE and Citizens in 2016, when unlike now they did not add but converge - would support a shared majority of 180 deputies for a legislature that is promised criticism; but the most immediate antecedents of Sánchez and his "band" - the bobalicona slogan that feeds another, the ineffable "sanitary cord", why not a luxurious red silk velvet, which surrounds the president of the Government in office - do Impossible is the formula archived by moderate Spain and a large part of an electorate that is perhaps more aware of the historical function -which was once a founding vocation- of Citizens than its supervitaminated leaders.

Meanwhile, Podemos is recreated in the semblance of calm that backs its most recent identity and perseveres in the negotiation offer of a joint Government to demonstrate its willingness to the agreement and learned moderation. And the PP, paradoxically favored by the circumstances, adopts a comfortable position and the least forced of the stories: that the PSOE seek guarantees among its natural allies.

Around these main accounts orbit other subsidiaries. Like the one deployed at the end of July by Gabriel Rufián from the tribune of Congress, assuming a comical identity of a good man, between mediator -reporter! - and statesman -Spanish! -, and using reasons that implicitly expose all ERC tactical embarrassments: now, Mr. Sanchez, we can support you, but when the days of the Diada arrive and the Supreme's sentence will be impossible; Nothing will have changed but everything will be different. Not surprisingly, Republican bases twist the gesture before the Spanish disposition of their eccentric spokesperson; It is striking that once again the published opinion seriously assumed the last pose of the independence leader.

The blissful "battle of the story" is presented as an effective formula while its gaseous nature fills the void of disagreement, vacations and analytical laziness. But its application to the common political debate is neither innocuous nor free, and it is necessary to think if the vericuetos by which it has been presented to the current use in this summer of interinity are traced.

The battle of the story had been to date, on the Spanish public stage, the front that opens when ETA announces the "definitive cessation of its armed activity" in October 2011. It is the battle that deposed terrorism is willing to raise for continue their struggle by other means and impose, with the connivance of their Democratic allies , a history of symmetrical violence and victims on both sides. Impose, from the same terminology, the toxic idea of ​​conflict linked to the peace process, both incompatible with the defeat, without euphemisms, of the band.

A nonprocess leads us to another, and the battle of the story is reproduced in Catalonia from 2017 onwards. The secessionist challenge implies the release of the great story of contemporary Spanish politics, which is none other than the story of independence. An imposing project of decades, capable of transforming the strategy of power of pujolism into a country project, in the will of a people. The succession of historical days that ends on October 1 is the definitive reagent, capable at the same time of multiplying the effect of the motley narrative device and reducing it to a simple and affordable fiction: a people who only wanted to vote has been violently repressed. A toxic fiction overflows political legitimacy.

But where the great triumph of the independence story is really verified is beyond Catalonia. The congenital disposition of the Spanish left, sociological or militant, to respect the identity claims of secessionism gradually takes on another face, which manifests itself in the rejection, tacit or active, of any civic or political discourse of defense of the unity of Spain . "What has Spain done for me?", Asks the young progressive naturally unfamiliar with the idea of ​​a political nation, infected with nationalist sentimentality and at this point surely perplexed by the battles, not precisely verbal, of grandparents whose memory until recently I wanted to redress.

Everything bad sticks, and the Spanish politics appears imbued with the storytelling that the technocrats of the nationalist delirium have long been handling with such ease. The molecular cuisine of spin doctors, based on marketing and propaganda, is the old new sensation. It is no longer about pedagogy but about telling stories. As in the newspapers. It is the new narrative order. The triumph of the story is the failure of politics.

Borja Martínez is a journalist, writer and director of Leer magazine. His latest published book is Lillian Hellman (2019).

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Columnists
• Citizens
• Spain
• PSOE
• PP
• Pablo Iglesias
• ETA
• Pedro Sanchez
• We can
• Inés Arrimadas
• Gabriel Rufián
• ERC
• Diada
• Congress of Deputies
• Albert rivera

Deviated column Pass the flu

Cinnamon Fine Politicians, Shame

Liberal Comments If we can yield