/ world today news/ I recently met Bai Dancho from the neighboring street. As we talked and got to the subject of the upcoming local elections, he told me that he had been watching on TV with interest how different political formations stated their positions and intentions regarding the upcoming local government elections. He was telling me about the various candidates being circulated.
But something was bothering him and he wanted to share it, until finally he said: “There hasn’t been a mayor on our street for 25 years, and when it’s time for elections – they fill the box with proclamations and want me to vote for them. And so until the next term”.
Perhaps the reason the mayor or councilor did not walk this street was because it was a dead end. Who walks in a dead end? It looks a little like our country from the beginning of the transition to today – without a clear perspective for development, and there is no direction. Wandering back and forth in transition, our country has finally reached the cul-de-sac of neoliberalism. Perhaps the society itself does not know where to continue – because of the wandering or because of the abstract directions that the power determines for it. They tell us about some prospects for 2020 or 2050, and at the same time, there is no one to pave the hole in the dead end street. It was last asphalted 30 years ago. There is no one to solve another local and social problem for you.
As the election nears, there is a sense of vibrancy, but it is not related to the impasse of the mayor or the candidates who want to ride the local government. Initiatives are usually taken by parties or individual party members or sympathizers. Just now, some activist passed by and stuck a poster on the fence of Bai Dancho. In the middle of the night. But Dancho wants to talk to them, to argue, to hear their views.
The slogans on the fence are always social, fair, with long promises, but behind them usually stand another demagogue – cocky and hypocritically smiling. And behind the masks – liars, greedy for power and predatory egoists. They want to demagogically attract us to their side and thus, through demagoguery, rule us. What can we expect from these apostles of demagoguery? Probably some of the candidates have never moved a brick in their life, but they will want to build roads, bridges and streets. Well, they will mostly be interested in public procurement…
Bai Dancho, however, continues to look for a mayor who is part of the people, first among equals, and not standing proudly above the people. He has been watching them like this for a quarter of a century. What to do, that’s our nature, he says. At first glance, you choose a nice apple, but when you cut it – a rotten one. But you have to put up with it for four years. Pigs don’t want to eat such apples either…
Although one of our mayors was found guilty of abuses and had to be replaced, the new one does not differ in mentality from the old one. Symbolically or not, but the administration of the previous one, accused of corruption, put a road sign on the dead end of Bai Dancho. With it, it was clearly visible that there was no exit from the street. Maybe it was for this reason that the rulers did not want to pass through this street…
Now the mayors will start a crazy race to show who has done how much for their municipality. There will be openings of sites and sites, successive first sods… However, poverty will reveal the demagoguery and lies of all the immoral rulers who badly managed their settlements, but who want yet another mandate.
Although our conversation was pessimistic about local government policy, Bai Dancho and I still expect changes to occur. To make local government what the state could not do for the people. Like better health care and engaging the unemployed not in temporary jobs, but in local, municipally owned enterprises that use municipal resources instead of giving them away to private companies. But in order for municipalities to become a better place to live, work and honesty are needed above all.
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