In a political panorama full of uncertainties, one of the few givens is that the latest electoral polls got it horribly wrong. Ignoring this detail, for months now the polls have been confused with real life, to the extent that Podemos has already won and lost the elections. The same has happened with Catalan independence, which --all of a sudden-- they claim it no longer has a majority behind it. I guess all those people who attended the three consecutive rallies on September 11 must have had a change of heart. The confusion is so absurd that in some forecasts they are already talking about parties that are declining, in spite of going from zero to twenty seats, just because some poll had put them at twenty-one.
Something similar is happening with the economic indicators. They have been used so many times to celebrate the end of the crisis, that when new data contradicts this, it seems like the crisis has returned instead of simply accepting that it had never gone away.
It seems like a lot of things are happening, but for the moment everything is virtual. Everything is happening in this parallel fictional world, where everything is as fake as some of the electoral lists of the PSC and PP for the municipal elections (1), or as unclear as Construïm, a group which specializes in destructive tweets, as the man driving it with one hand shrugs them off with the other (2).
Some of those who pull the strings in this spectacle, dazzled by the sets that they themselves have built, are having a ball. They’re living very exciting lives --now Podemos is leading, now it’s Ciudadanos, now they’re picturing stability pacts. And for some time now, they’ve been acting as if some of their wishes had already been granted --for example, the death of the independence process. Someone should warn them that when they wake up, the process will still be there.
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(1) N.T. In the run-up to the local elections in Catalonia it has recently transpired that the PP and the PSC are using “paper” or “ghost” candidates to run in small towns and villages where they have little to no support. These are usually party members who live elsewhere, sometimes even outside Catalonia. They don’t stand a chance of being elected, but add muscle to their party’s overall electoral effort and are entitled to some public funding.
(2) N.T. Construïm is a political opinion group led by Josep Antoni Duran, leader of Unió Democràtica, the smallest of the two-party coalition led by Catalan president Artur Mas. Construïm (“Let’s Build”) have recently posted a number of messages on Twitter criticising the independence process.
