Cuddly caudillo

With the events that today guide the international conjuncture – from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to the Trump administration – it is easy to be overwhelmed with the hallucinating pace that things have happened, leaving little room to pay attention to other things that, even if less pressing, are still important. And what has happened in Spain is one of the most blatant cases. The ‘Frankenstein’ government – a spring managem – led by socialist Pedro Sánchez has proven to be harmful to the Spaniards. It cannot approve budgets and is sustained by a majority contranature in the general courts, having created a dependence on Catalan and Basque independentist parties, undermining Spanish cohesion and the Constitution itself approved by referendum in 1978 – a fundamental milestone in the transition process of the franchise totalitarian regime.

Successive attempts to control the press, especially El País, the largest Spanish newspaper, are also one of the characteristics of this progressive government. But this week we came to us good news of the Madrid Newsroom: Joseph Outorlian is the new president of the Diary and began with a devastating editorial. With the title, translated from Spanish, my commitment to El País: Editorial Freedom and Independence, the text compares Sánchez to Franco: “It would be unacceptable that, at the moment we remember the death of dictator Francisco Franco, 50 years ago, someone was tempted to try to take hold of an independent media from the government, and directly using a public company as an instrument».

It is often attributed to Pedro Sánchez an extraordinary political ability, as if he were a disciple of Machiavellian doctrine. Now if Sánchez approaches Machiavelli’s teachings with regard to cynicism and incessant search – and retention – of power, the socialist leader jumped some important parts of the work of the great Florentine thinker. « The first method for gauging a ruler’s intelligence is to look at men around him, » he said. Looking around the government president, it is not difficult to reticent about its quality. Of the faithful squires like María Jesús Montero or Yolanda Díaz, to the family arrival-see the cases of his wife and brother-passing by José Luis Albalos and Koldo Garcia, if there is something that Sánchez is not well surrounded. Another of the important passages of the 16th century philosopher says: « If a prince maintains his state through mercenary armies, he will never be stable or safe. » Well, it seems to me that Sánchez’s strategy to maintain power through parties representing an independentist bangs disrespects this maxim.

The dependence on these groups is evident in the inconsistencies of Pedro Sánchez’s discourse, which says he has a government to combat the far right relying on far-right parties; accuses the right parties of Xenophobia when they require tighter control over immigration, but if Carles Puigdemont – fugitive from Spanish justice and Junts leader – requires control of immigration in Catalonia, Sánchez Cede. And these are only two examples of the fragility of the socialist, which rules Spain in a context as complex as the present one.

For all this, the similarities to Franco already described, along with the instability of his executive, make Pedro Sánchez a caudillo, but with clay feet.