In the early 70s, after the film was released Diamonds for eternity, actor Sean Connery stated that “never moreHe would once again step into the shoes of James Bond to play the seductive British secret service agent born from the imagination of writer Ian Fleming. Thirteen years later, in 1983, Connery ate his words and reappeared on the screen playing, this time, a mature Bond. The sarcasm of the director or producers caused the film to be released under the title Never say never again (Never say never again) in reference to the promise made and not fulfilled by the leading actor, who died last year.
The incendiary rhetorics that have replaced calm and reasonable dialogue in politics, that “atmosphere of partisan rancor and distrust” described by the philosopher Michael J. Sandel in his magnificent essay The tyranny of meritThey have populated the speeches of our public officials with ultimatums and restrictive positions; They, emulating Connery, say “never again”, knowing that later tacticisms, possibilism and capricious parliamentary arithmetic will force them to swallow their own words, commitments and promises. On the frontispiece of all parties should appear the phrase “Never say never again.”
Let’s go with the examples. Let’s start with outsiders. In Italy, the technocrat Mario Draghi, former head of the European Central Bank, is on the verge of squaring the political circle: becoming prime minister of the Alpine country with the almost unanimous support of all parties. Italians Beppe Grillo, founder of the anti-establishment 5-Star movement (M5S), and Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right La Liga, are willing to support the one -Draghi- who represents everything they said to fight from irreconcilable positions. The sinkhole of history has absorbed the anti-European speeches of Grillo and Salvini, including the abolition of the euro, to support, for the good of Italy, they say, a European prime minister who put all his efforts to save the euro.
In Spain the examples multiply. In September 2019, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, then in office, pronounced a phrase that he will have already digested, but many of his voters have been she was: “I would not sleep at night, like 95 percent of Spaniards, if I had accepted the impositions of Podemos to govern in coalition”. Four months later he closed a government agreement in tandem with the object of his nightmares.
The exalted pronouncements of demonization of the contrary tend to intensify with the proximity of electoral processes, very permissive stages that, after the verdict of the polls, are redirected towards a certain normality, although the parliaments and hemicycles always offer refuge to the histrionic attitudes of their lordships .
We were able to verify it once again last Thursday, in the Valencian Parliament, during the control session of the Botanical Government. The opposition, in the figures of Isabel Bonig (PP) and Toni Cantó (Cs), returned under their jurisdiction to enter to kill the Consell as a whole and its president, Ximo Puig, in particular. The health management of the pandemic, the policy of restrictions on mobility and the closure of economic sectors, dissensions within the Consell itself, and investigations into the companies of the President’s brother were the issues around which the volleys of Bonig and Cantó, united in the task of tightening the nuts on the regional executive. Then, with the lights off and the hemicycle left, Cantó will once again be a privileged interlocutor for Ximo Puig, much more than Bonig. He sang could star in a future remake of Never say never.
Vice President Oltra also emulated Connery. During the critical episode of December on account of the regional budgets and subsequent aftershocks due to discrepancies in the management of the pandemic, Mónica Oltra chose to mark distances with Ximo Puig and allow that kind of sit-down strike to become visible in the defense of the government action that maintains them as members of the legislature. “Never more“, The vice president came to say, jaded by the, in her opinion, no one to whom he was subjected from the Presidency of the Generalitat. Last Thursday, she was the first to go to the speakers’ rostrum to throw a gold and scarlet cape on Puig and give the PP where it hurts the most: “Brothers are not chosen, but corruption is”, He snapped at the popular Eva Ortiz, after reminding her of the rosary of irregular cases in which the PP has been involved.
Although rivals at the polls, today Puig and Oltra are still government partners. Much will have to change the electoral demography so that in the future both will not be needed to make a third edition of the Botanico viable. They have learned that there is never to be said never.
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