The majority of citizens believe that the tension will increase in this legislature and blame, above all, to the two parties of the right, more to the Vox that for the PP, to generate the climate of enrage that we are witnessing. In 2007, the first Report on Democracy published by the Foundation for Alternatives, I had the opportunity to be the co-author of the chapter that developed the theory and practice of the “strategy of tension”, which then has been written: why, how and when the PP clung to this mode of performance to make politics.
Having in Spain, more progressive-minded people who are conservative, the tension is produced on issues divisive to the left, as the debate on territorial and terrorism. Using a tone tremendista and exaggerated to delegitimize the Government with the ultimate aim of demobilizing the electorate, moderate and left-wing. Now, beneath that noise is kept to the patterns of cooperation between the PSOE and the PP: in the first legislature of Rodríguez Zapatero, the popular approved more than half of the organic laws, presented a number of amendments to the whole on the bills than other legislatures, and in the various political conferences held by the party in those years, they made proposals on issues as varied did not show any dye radicals. In reality, tension does not affect the questions of the left-right axis, such as the dependency law, in which the policy worked as usual. It was in the subjects that escaped the confrontation left-right with the tension reigned.
does it Produce the highly charged electoral gains? History shows us that not always. The strategy of tension works when there is a real basis for that so be it, that is to say, when it says the party crispador finds an echo in the public opinion. In 1996, the PP won the elections twitching, but his speech about the end of the cycle the period of socialist coincided with the vision of their own voters. In contrast, in 2008, he was the PSOE that expanded its electoral majority because the citizens did not believe that Spain were to break, or that the State give way before ETA. Now, in 2020, the fear of the breakdown of Spain was still lower. The citizens are concerned about pensions, climate change, social inequalities or the possibility of a new recession. Everything points to the return to the tension, will not give the fruits electoral right expected, but will deteriorate the institutions and generate a climate divisive among the citizenry.
Belén Barreiro is the president of 40dB.
