It seems we will have to get used to the idea of a Prime Minister ending up convicted of corruption. Even ending up sleeping in jail, stripped of all his Zambian trinkets. The proverbial backlog of cases in the Audiencia Nacional will mean that the sentence will not arrive for another five years, but when it does, we will have to face the paradox (only apparent) that precisely the most moralistic of our former presidents will be the first to enter prison, we will see if alone or in the company of his daughters.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was perfectly described by Rajoy in two words: “solemn fool” (it’s a pity that Don Mariano doesn’t lavish such stinging precision in the self-evident prose of his columns). He demonstrated this by stating, with emphatic solemnity only within reach of cynics or stupids, that being a socialist means having very little and being willing to give a lot. What happened then to our social democratic Bambi? Did the fawn metamorphose into a shark down the precipice of greed?
My thesis is different. I suspect that Zapatero did not set up a multinational organized crime syndicate despite his moralism but precisely because of it. There is a type of progressive – it also happens with Christians of the Pharisaic caste – so full of their moral narcissism that they end up convincing themselves that the rules of this world were made for the impure; that is, the fascists. They come to be Calvinists of politics, consciences split between faith and works who militate in the abstraction of Good (“the-right-side-of-History”) precisely so as not to have to practice it. If my thesis is correct, while negotiating illegal commissions in exchange for his opaque mediation with dictatorial regimes, Zapatero was persuaded (he still is!) that he was fighting for true democracy and opposing savage capitalism. Because this kind of beautiful soul believes that progressivism is wherever they are: it materializes first in their mouth, and then descends to rest in their pockets.
I’m sorry to quote Josep Pla again today, but I’m rereading him because summer goes very well with the smoothness of his style, allergic to all imposture:
-When you give power to the virtuous, everyone starves.
President Zapatero’s moralism almost ruined the country. His moralism as former president has limited the ruin to his family.
