Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2013, in the middle of Spain’s economic crisis, with Rajoy as prime minister and Rubalcaba leading the opposition; the debates on taxes, health co-payments, collective redundancies, unemployment benefits and the government’s promised improvement in 2014 reflect that time.
The Canadian Tommy Douglas once said, in a famous, historic speech, that governments of cats should not rule countries of mice, meaning that politicians’ interests are not the same as those of ordinary citizens. Politicians are not a species or race like ours, or even similar to it. They do not suffer the same problems and they are not affected by the decisions they usually make, which instead affect the rest of the population.
Basically, someone who does not know what a coffee costs on the street cannot govern. People who have never had money problems cannot talk about economic problems. Nor can people whose future is secure no matter what happens talk about the future of Spaniards.
A lawyer has to spend two years as a trainee before practising. A pilot has to log hundreds of hours in a simulator before getting into a real aircraft, and yet we citizens hand power to a politician who has no experience of the real problems of the people he has to govern.
The challenge for Aznar, Rajoy, Rubalcaba and company.
We take everyone who aspires to become prime minister (Presidente del Gobierno) so that they can apply the theory they have learned, and for 24 months they get a “real simulation” of what they are meant to govern, moving up through the levels as if it were a video game.
The reality show would consist of taking each candidate out of their own world, putting them on a salary of €1,200 and giving them an eight-hour job, even if it is as a seat warmer at some company. But on a split shift, mind you. We will put them in charge of two school-age children, an elderly woman with a disability and an elderly man with a chronic illness.
Level 1. We will let them choose between a mortgage and renting (it makes no difference). For the first six months their job will be the same as any Spaniard’s: keeping that family afloat. That way they will learn the real price of money and how rises in electricity, water and gas bills hit.
Also what it means to drive around cities with nowhere to park, even though we pay road tax. We raise their taxes a little more while making them sit through a speech by Montoro: “We cannot lower taxes.”
Level 2. Their company has to cut their salary while, at the same time, the health co-payment (or double payment, or whatever it is called) is phased in. We make them sit through the speech: “The thing is, in Spain we have to work more and earn less, but next year we will see an improvement. By the way, on Friday we will make new structural reforms, cuts, or whatever they call them now.”
Level 3. Their company carries out an ERE (a collective redundancy procedure) before going bust, and the candidate is among the first to be laid off. That way they will find out how an unemployed person with several dependants lives. Meanwhile, we keep warning them that Germany is asking for unemployment benefits to be cut and tightened. We play them the speech: “Entrepreneurs are the solution to the crisis. You have to start a business. I encourage you to do so.”
Level 4. After knocking on hundreds of doors that stay shut, the candidate decides to start a business. Let’s suppose that the would-be prime minister, after three months of carrying folders and papers from one government office to another and overcoming every single one of the f***ing bureaucratic hurdles, manages to get their way. By this level, their imaginary children have probably lost weight and their wife is hooked on antidepressants for fear that the bank will repossess the house they have not paid for in two months, since unemployment benefit does not stretch very far. Let’s suppose the bank grants them a loan for the business and the candidate becomes an entrepreneur.
Level 5. Nobody walks into the business, while the candidate has to pay their self-employed contributions religiously so as not to join the underground economy or the tax dodgers. They are up to their eyeballs in debt. They no longer know how they will pay for next month’s groceries, while they read hundreds of online business papers that all say the same thing: “To get the economy back on its feet, taxes have to come down.”
Level 6. This is the level where the revelation comes: the candidate, who cannot pay for the medicines of the elderly people in their care, nor the mortgage or rent, nor the groceries, keeps hearing speeches like “Spain is improving. In 2014 we will see an improvement.” That is when the candidate looks at the unemployment figures, which have risen considerably, realises that their business will not work if people have no money to spend, and says something like: “What a bunch of incompetents.”
Level 7. We choose a winner.
By this point, most Spaniards, embittered and overwhelmed by the sad situation, look for ways to keep going for their family, their children, their sick relatives. Some try odd jobs in the underground economy, others keep at the hard work of looking for a job day after day without losing hope, but they get by.
This human race (politicians), on the other hand, I do not think could withstand a situation like this. The winner would be the politician who, over those 24 months, had the strength, bravery and courage to hold out to the end.
If you have never been through a situation like this, or have never been close to someone who has, I am sorry: you neither deserve to go into politics nor are you able to. I would only trust a politician who has climbed the ladder on their own merits in this life and knows the real value of money, with a perfect understanding of people’s real problems and of how certain decisions affect them. Empathy and emotional intelligence are two things a leader must have. That is leadership; everything else is a fraud, a load of s*** or whatever they call it now.
It is a pity that a reality show like this is a utopia, though it would be nice.
Featured image: Barcex, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
