Opinion | Old left rascals

My father called Uruguay. After some opening gemopper about NATO and Ukraine, he turned out to be cheerful about the doubling of that Linke in the German elections. It was due to informed young voters.

Maybe that youth was hopeful that I was looking for. For a client I have to write something about things that vote hopeful. How they came up with me is also a mystery to me. I draw hope from things like the bird flu virus that quietly turns to cows in the United States. Every other virus that decimates humanity is also fine, but that is probably not the story that the client is waiting for.

It is understandable that young people voted on that Linke. Young people have to do it with this society for years. They need politicians who ensure that billionaires do not purchase the basic facilities of peoples. Politicians who at least take climate change seriously. Young people cannot afford a standstill with a lower abdomen on populists who cannot rule.

The Germans just have to look at the neighbors to see where that leads. As in a dysfunctional family, PVV members Wilders and Faber are the angry parents who fudder all the time on foreigners and threaten with measures that they cannot live up to at all. Other politicians hang back as adolescent children, so on: Doe. In the meantime, the BBBABYS lubricate the entire house with their own shit. Soon the teenagers will become mature and leave the house. Then Marjolein and Geert are left alone with the babies. They probably declare themselves sovereign.

The left -most president under which I was a citizen was the Uruguayan Pepe Mujica. In The last interview he gave the BBChe said that people need a goal in life. For people with a goal – albeit making the world a better place or insulating a molecule – buy things secondary. Without a goal, the danger that the market is lurking. Then you only work to buy things and pay repayments. « Then you are functional for the mechanisms of the market and ultimately confuse you. »

Left or not, on such sermons I go on the desert as a wind. Mujica argues for austerity. He was the president who drove a Volkswagen Beetle. Who thanked for the presidential residence during his term of office and remained in their three -room home with his wife. With more leaders like him, humanity may not have become this over -consuming monster: leaders who would tax billionaires to millionaires, who would restrict luxury consumption. Who do not lead in accordance with the market, but those who protect citizens against market forces.

Now the market is our leader and Mujica, nine -like years old, has stopped his cancer treatments. It feels a bit or left. Not that on the right will survive. Now that less is being done against human emissions, luxury consumption and pollution, climate change will come to achieve us all. At least if that virus is not ahead of her. The antics of the current pseudole leaders are like the mythical orchestra on the Titanic: an act for scattering while we go down.

« No dude, » my father said. « On Saturday, Mujica is just there. » Saturday is the inauguration of the new Uruguayan president, that will be Mujica's successor on the left, after five years a conservative. My father: « Then the old man talks for more than two presidents who came together after him. »

Now I am looking forward to Saturday, but I am not hopeful. For hope I have my father.

Carolina Trujillo is a writer.

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