Regeneration and transformation of Spain
The alleged lack of an articulate and dynamic civil society in Spain is often invoked to justify both the authoritarian drift of the executive and the lack of response to the generalised deterioration of institutions. To refute at least the latter argument, Sociedad Civil Ahora held its 3rd National Congress in Madrid, where almost a hundred experts and half a thousand attendees debated the reasons why Spain is gradually slipping from the most advanced group in the European Union, and possible actions for its regeneration.
Under the baton of its president, Aldo Olcese, and the director of this Congress, Silvia Iranzo, the different panels saw numerous businessmen, professors, researchers, diplomats, economists and intellectuals present their diagnoses and outline possible lines of action for this hypothetical new regeneration that Spain seems to be in need of.
As an observer of the event, I was struck by a number of statements and observations. For example, the reference to a statement once made by the never sufficiently praised Ramón Menéndez Pidal: "In Spain, which has historically been the most egalitarian country in Europe, there have never been elites but powerful people". It is clear that it is not the same thing: the elites project their knowledge and their forward-looking impulse on the society to which they belong, without any fear of reprisal or cancellation. This lack of elites, in effect, creates a gulf with countries with which we believe we can compete and even surpass them, as the former Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero boasted in his day.
The lack of elites thus facilitates the emergence of "powerful people", who are powerful according to the position they hold, with the consequent capacity both to promote the progress and development of major projects and, on the contrary, to multiply nepotism and the replacement of the merit and talent of those who depend on them by submission and dependence. This impoverishing phenomenon reaches its greatest heights in politics, where the theoretical representatives of the people owe less and less to the people and more and more to the leader or list-maker who appoints them and thus provides them with a livelihood, often far beyond what they would have achieved in the tough competition of the private sector.
Particularly devastating were the analyses of the situation of Spanish companies and entrepreneurs, "relentlessly subjected to that weapon of mass destruction that is the BOE", according to Jesús Cacho. For the founder and director of Vozpópuli, "there is an evident testicular impulse in the authoritarian relationship of power with businessmen: "There are no coj... for a Spanish company (Ferrovial) to change its registered office", even though it complies with all its legal and tax obligations. Cacho recalled that this testicular impulse was once wielded by the president of Grupo Prisa, Jesús Polanco, when he stated that "there were no coj... in Spain to deny it a television station".
The systematic intervention of power in the lives of people and companies has been taking over more and more spaces, to the point of making people believe that this power is increasingly unpunished, authoritarian and irresponsible, while the intervened and the governed have been dwarfing their actions or looking for alternative ways to put their entrepreneurial spirit in less hostile territories. In the heat of the debate, it emerged that the chairman of Ferrovial, Rafael del Pino, had his whatsapp account full to overflowing with messages of support, many of them of enormous forcefulness, although none of the illustrious senders have come forward to repeat them in public.
The many panellists who took part in the roundtable discussions on Spain's role in Europe were unanimous in highlighting both the general decline experienced by the European Union itself in the world and that of Spain itself within the EU. However, there was also almost total unanimity that Spain can emerge from irrelevance, for which the first condition is that it operates as a driving force in the initiatives and sectors in which it could and should be a leader, from renewable energies to the agri-food and tourism industries. But it must also earn the respect of the other partners by fulfilling its obligations. Runaway public debt and deficits are not the best calling card for this, especially when the analysis of chapters such as pensions raises serious doubts about their sustainability.
Europe, Africa and America have a lot to do to contribute to their prosperity, which is tantamount to saying that it is also our prosperity, such is the current degree of interdependence. This will only be possible with an environment favourable to the establishment and permanence of Spanish companies, whose legal security must be ensured by a government committed to this external action.
Special mention should also be made of journalism, whose media survive thanks to the institutional advertising that the public authorities increasingly manage as a private preserve, and to the help provided in various ways by the business fabric. What would happen," wondered one media director, "if one day three or four Ibex 35 executives agreed to cut off the tap". To which he himself replied: "We would have no choice but to close down". Probably because, unlike in Anglo-Saxon countries, in Spain there have been neither elites nor real media editors.
Despite so much well-informed diagnosis (one of the definitions of pessimism), Civil Society Now believes that there are reasons to believe in the regeneration and consequent relaunching of Spain. The first date for this is the municipal and regional elections on 28 May.