The XV Legislature: paralysis, political brutalization and the end of a mandate

The XV Legislature of Democracy is exhausting but not dying. Dying has been since August 17, 2023. The same day it started. The garbage minutes of the last year of Pedro Sánchez's mandate are exactly the same as the first. Paralysis and political brutalization. The first is more serious.

The next presentation of the General State Budgets only serves to activate the timer towards the elections and put institutional blush on the most illiberal scar of the democratic period. The one in which the President of the Government has not wanted to respect the popular representation deposited in Congress.

The problems with which the quadrennium began are the same as those that conclude it. Only aggravated. Housing is scarcer and more expensive, regional financing is deformed, the educational decline is a reason to blush, and the international politics on which Sánchez has established himself as a figure beyond our borders has become a threat to the territorial integrity of the country, as can be seen in Ceuta.

Not a single structural reform has been approved beyond the scrapping of documents sent to Brussels in search of the 60 billion it has disbursed in European funds, the only investment lung of the legislature. Faced with the autonomies, even its own, the central government has been reduced to a kind of consultant to the big four in the event of any emergency. And there have been many.

The entrenchment of inflation in the pockets of taxpayers, partly thanks to Iran and partly to the Treasury, blurs the good GDP and employment data. But there is little else to offer except the promise of resistance to the ultra international, embodied in rampant Trumpism, the techno-oligarchs, the judges and the Madrid of Díaz Ayuso. With the Trampolín beach dismantling the immigration argument, everything is entrusted to convert the trail of elections called in Europe and America into an internal campaign, where the populist right promises to challenge essential values ​​of our coexistence.

The most reliable enemy in the face of this onslaught is not the left or the moderate right, but the democratic strength represented in the institutions. And populism's best friend is called the cordon sanitaire. Wherever it is applied, see Germany or France, the anti-establishment right grows. Once it jumps and it is possible to put ideology in contact with reality, it begins to suffer. Poison in small doses is sometimes transformed into an antidote.

The advantage of the most representative parliamentary systems, such as the Spanish one, over the presidential systems, such as the French or the American one, is that whoever wins does not take the entire pot. The result of the elections in Sweden throws up interesting interpretations. The emergence of the most racist far-right in governance, even if only as external support, has weakened it precisely. Sánchez will present the next elections with "barbarism or me." But Spain is not like that nor is its campaign against the Judiciary any less barbaric. And what remains.