The Christmas lottery is now on sale. The rush of the present gives no respite, and procrastinating is for idlers. What can be done today, don’t leave for tomorrow. If we buy concert tickets one or two years in advance, there’s nothing strange about getting the winning lottery tickets in the middle of July. By the way, if you want to ensure a refund, know that this year the jackpot will end in 2, the number of world championships won by the Spanish national football team. Initially, it was supposed to end in 7, Ferran Torres’s jersey number, the goal scorer against Argentina. But the bigwigs of the draw have decided that this number won’t even be in the drum. The still-Barcelona player and final hero must be punished for going to celebrate the title in Madrid dressed in a cap with Trumpist typography and slogan: “Make Spain Great Again”.
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Having said the nonsense, let’s move on to what is supposedly serious. Yesterday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo gave his assessment of the end of the political year. And it undoubtedly influenced him that the jackpot tickets are being sold. The popular leader predicted that next Christmas will be Pedro Sánchez’s last in La Moncloa. The wait is becoming so long and heavy for the Galician that he uses his speeches to eliminate entire seasons. Yesterday, he wiped out what’s left of summer and the entire autumn in one fell swoop. Someone in his circle should warn him, even though he already knows it, that the walker’s haste does not quicken the ox’s pace.
Feijóo should start to wear the presidential habit
Nothing is worse for an opposition leader than anger, haste, and taking for granted what is still only a possibility. Regarding anger, whether sincere or affected, Feijóo should start to wear the presidential habit, following the Anglo-Saxon advice to appear to be it until you are (“fake it until you make it”). Good spirits and less hand-to-hand combat. Leave the street fighting and beheadings to his soldiers and dare to ride the clouds, which is the best way to stay dry, as it always rains downwards.
Prophesying how many Christmases Sánchez has left in La Moncloa is excessive and risky
Regarding haste, put it aside, for we are already entering the garbage time of the legislature, to use the terminology of basketball commentators, and it is the government that is choking on its own rope. And as for claiming it’s a done deal, less wolves, Little Red Riding Hood. Prophesying how many Christmases Sánchez has left in La Moncloa is excessive and risky. This is a lesson that should have been learned. And if you need to review it, just mentally travel to the scrutiny and the archives of 2023.
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If Feijóo acts as if it were possible to advance the clock by raising the tone and volume, “sanchismo” lives the opposite delusion: believing it can stop the clock by behaving like the Japanese wise monkeys. For weeks, the executive has been acting as if it were a recreation of Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru, the primates who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Zapatero? We still trust him. The Director General of the Civil Guard and her number two? Ditto. The adventures of the well-digger Leire? Gossip and “lawfare”. Ábalos and Cerdán? Who are these people you’re talking about? The government lives chained to a mutism, blindness, and deafness that is increasingly painful even for those willing to cling to anything to continue defending it tooth and nail.
It is true that, having chosen the path of entrenchment, Sánchez is not in a position to do anything other than emulate Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru. Dismissing the Director General of the Civil Guard or abandoning the closing of ranks around Zapatero would be tantamount to accepting that the wave of corruption is already wetting the government’s trousers. And that, in terms of narrative, the only thing that matters in politics today, would weaken the strategy followed so far, which insists, in some cases with more conviction than in others, on placing all judicial woes in the realm of persecution that the social, media, political, and judicial right practices against “sanchismo”. Only this discourse no longer works, at least not the crude attempt to pass off the part for the whole.
Tick, tock, tick, tock. From now until the elections, hours will still be sixty minutes, days twenty-four hours, and months thirty or thirty-one days. But as in Eugenio’s joke, they will feel longer to us. Trapped as we are between those who clumsily wish to burn the calendar and those who maliciously fantasize about freezing it.
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