Juan Luis Cebrianjournalist and academic from the RAE, has recently compiled his articles published in the newspaper ‘El País’ between 2018 and 2024 in a book. Edited by North Slopeis titled ‘The Sánchez effect’, because the fall of the current president of the Government and of the PSOE into populism and its effects on the entire society are the core issue of his reflections.
The process goes so fast that reality surpasses any analysis. Cebrián affirms that “of course many more serious things are happening, because Sánchez is practicing what is called illiberal democracyits system of government is an occupation of the institutions that allows it to move towards a type of decaffeinated autocracy, something that already occurs in other democratic countries.
It speaks of a global process, foreign to ideology, but which in Spain comes from the left. Is this rare in Europe? «We saw that process on the left taken to the extreme in Venezuela or Peru. And it reminds me of Peronism,” says Cebrián. “The peculiar thing here is that Sánchez lost the elections – he adds – and has had to rely on supremacist and xenophobic political formations such as Junts or ERC, not to mention the support of the heirs of ETA, when many of Bildu’s supporters could help the clarification of hundreds of terrorist crimes and they do not do it.
How to define the ‘Sanchez effect’? “The attempt to control parliaments, some judges and the press, simply out of an attachment to power above citizen interests,” asserts Cebrián. Regarding the protean capacity to survive the growing cases of corruption that surround him, it is clear: «I do not believe that Sánchez is an intellectual. This drift is not an ideological movement, it is a psychopathic movement of power. Liberal democracy is greatly threatened, starting with the United States of America.
Sánchez has left many former PSOE allies outside the ‘wall’, and columnists like Savater, or Cebrián himself, have had to leave ‘El País’. «It is not a question of ideology, but of democratic conviction. ‘El País’ is clearly influenced by the positions of the current Socialist Party, which has already excluded Joaquin Leguinato Nicolas Redondo and is about to disown who built it, Felipe González. What we are seeing is a betrayal of the Transition, which promoted the union of all Spaniards. And Sánchez has been the president who has divided them the most, for the exclusive benefit of his personal power.
Among the symptoms, Cebrián highlights that “we have a government that, in fact, does not govern; What it does is follow the resistance manual”, and that is why “there is a crisis of representation, the deputies do not control the government, it is the government that controls them. They vote what they are told, they do not even read the decrees or laws they approve, which generates stupid governance problems. “We are facing a partitocracy with citizen representation in crisis.” With irony, he remembers that Sánchez recently stated that his figure is “inseparable from that of the President of the Government.” And that is like saying: the State is me. Cebrián concludes: “I am optimistic, I believe in the Spanish people.”
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