Parliamentary cancer

Borja Sémper, of the People's Party (PP), has announced that he has cancer, and many of his opponents have immediately expressed their solidarity. It's a common phenomenon: expressing affection in exceptional circumstances that, like a magical parenthesis, freezes the usual tension. Today, the media showcase is a gallery of mirrors that amplify vanities to the point of nausea. Understanding and solidarity can also hide posturing that, in private, would be more authentic.

The humanitarian response sparked by Sémper's announcement was short-lived, and the tension fueling the discrediting of politics has been reactivated with even greater virulence.

A few days ago, in a very sad debate in the Congress of Deputies, another episode of general decline was experienced. President Pedro Sánchez explained the alleged corruption of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), and, on behalf of Sumar (Sumar), Vice President Yolanda Díaz took the podium to present her arguments. A tragic coincidence: her father had died the night before, and her opponents felt obliged to offer their condolences. In the case of the PP, the spokesperson was Alberto Núñez Feijoo, who, after sharing her condolences, unleashed the usual barrage of accusations against the government and the repertoire of insults intended to turn Sánchez into a poisonous replica of Satan.

The PP party sabotaged Yolanda Díaz with interruptions and vulgar shouting.

But the saddest part was when Díaz began her speech and the PP party sabotaged it with constant interruptions, with a stridency and vulgarity that confirmed what, as a deputy, Pablo Iglesias defined as "playing the wild boar." It's a tradition that José Antonio Labordeta rightly combated with his categorical: "Fuck it!" The wild boars didn't respect Díaz's emotional state. After the condolences were over, they attacked her, without Speaker Francina Armengol being able to do more than Ana Pastor did when she tried to calm the shouting of the barbarians in the chamber.

Desperate, Díaz sought the president's protection without finding answers, resigning herself to the fact that, at the end of Sánchez's speech, the PP faction was clamoring for her resignation. In Díaz's case, the boars' attitude was unpunished and symptomatic. When, speaking with a boar, I asked him about this demobilizing and repulsive attitude, he told me that one cannot be so thin-skinned and that the British Parliament is much more vehement than the Spanish. And using a vernacular expression I've never understood, he added: "Go cry and cry."

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Applying this logic, there are also parliaments in which members of parliament beat each other up and threaten to kill each other. Perhaps, to break the self-destructive drift of public service and the intolerance of wild boars, it would be advisable to impose a truce sine die during which their lordships act as if all their colleagues have just had a father die or have just been diagnosed with cancer.