A recent headline in Spain’s digital newspaper El
Diario announced that, according to spokesperson Pablo Casado of the right-wing
People’s Party (PP), Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had “won the debate
he didn’t attend.” Rajoy happens to head the PP.
The debate in question was organized
by the prominent Spanish paper El País ahead of the country’s general elections
on December 20. Rajoy had refused to grace with his presence the other
participants: the leaders of the PSOE, Ciudadanos, and Podemos—the three
political parties that appear poised to take second, third and fourth
place, respectively, in the elections, at least according to an opinion poll by
the state-funded Center for Sociological Research. (Other pollsters have warned of the extreme unpredictability of the
outcome.)
It is of course the function of
spokespeople everywhere to warp reality in favor of whatever product they’re
selling—otherwise they’d be out of a job—but Casado’s declaration of victory in
absentia is particularly misleading. After all, the real loser on Dec. 20 will
be, hands down, the two-party system that has traditionally dominated Spanish
politics, of which Rajoy’s PP constitutes one half.
Additional delusions surface in
Casado’s claim that it’s wrong to assume that “new
politics are better than good politics,” the implication being that the “old
politics” are automatically good. Consider the fact that it was none other than
the bipartisan stewardship of crippling austerity measures and home evictions
in the aftermath of the financial crisis—itself also incidentally a hallmark of politics as usual—that spurred the
eruption of Podemos in the first place. READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.