When it is said that the dialogue (or negotiation) table is marketing, it is done in the negative. As a synonym for propaganda, photo and nothing else. And in fact, following this reasoning, then the same label would have to be applied to today’s meeting of the Consell Executiu outside Palau, which has been sold to us as a “conference”, thus in the plural, referring to a few hours together, and little plus.
In the Council on Tuesday in Sant Jaume, one of the independent voices of the Government, reinforced by a colleague of his also with experience in the private sector, observed that if there was not a previous exchange of roles and a few minutes for questions from the other councilors to each intervention of them, today Saturday, the thing would not happen to be a photo. They came to answer that it was what there was. Marketing, they call it. But this is very generous according to whom and lowers the meaning of the word applied to politics. Because political marketing refers above all to communication strategies. And a photo album, by itself, does not describe any strategy. It is pure tactic. Short dribble. Image without background.
How to build a solid project if the priorities are set by a photo album?
An African proverb says that we are children of our time more than of our parents. The same are the signs of the times. But for those who think politics, it is always mandatory to resort to certain classics such as Cardinal Mazarino, who advocated pretending and also concealing. Well that. It shouldn’t be so noticeable, so much empty.
It is true that the most stable thing in our lives is instability. But, how to build a solid political project if the priorities are set by a photo album on the back of a cyclothymic media agenda? How to resolve disagreements between government partners with a family photo? And, more seriously, how to resolve the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain with photos and little else? And this, the Catalan allies of Pedro Sánchez, what does it oblige? To take photos with him empty of content? To keep confronting him basically with equally empty warnings and gestures?
Meanwhile, it is no longer just the clear will of the PSOE to do, at a minimum, as President Carles Puigdemont and exile do not exist. They postpone sine die the review of the crime of sedition, they say that there is no repression here and that reporting it is an exaggeration. But, in addition, it is possible that they have believed their own lie and that they have assumed that with the pardons it was all over.
Next week, that of the Diada, we will hear pro-independence politicians raising the tone. Sánchez will have served it on a tray, as if making a pass to goal at the right moment. But those who previously criticized the “weekend independentistas” should not fall into the same thing now, but adapted to emblematic dates. And it is that, from Madrid they remind them, without hesitation, that the independence claim (like all of them) is either permanent and with a solid strategy, or it can be part, easily, of those tactical photos that the agenda and the wind took away.
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