The time of Sánchez: an unstructured speech
The use of television by President Sanchez and his ministers in the coronavirus crisis has led to a clear abuse of the media, exasperating viewers and leading to open criticism by analysts, who are torn between confirming the low quality of the presidential discourse and looking for underground clues to understand what seems like a mellifluous strategy. Sanchez offers little concrete information and instead talks at length trying to create a role for himself as father of the nation. The most common analysis is that omnipresence is sought, to cover up the absence of decisions at the beginning of the crisis. But it could also be a clear strategy of reconversion of the facts, accusing others to amend a bad planning of the government management. As Cioran warned us: Improvisation leads us to be charlatans out of desperation. He applied it to the Spanish heirs of the lost empire. Is that what Sanchez practices today? Talking desperately to hide government improvisation?
While visiting Valladolid, the Romanian philosopher Emile Cioran entered the House of Cervantes and while contemplating a portrait of Philip III a woman who was in the same room turned to the visitor and said "With him our decline began." The nihilist and ever-so-acid philosopher relates this in his book The Temptation to Exist. He felt then that the concept of "decadence" was very much internalized in the Spanish soul, placing the national drift at the time of the loss of the Empire. As a consequence of the pain in the face of what he could not or did not know how to preserve, Cioran described the Spanish as improvisers of illusions and charlatans out of desperation.
Improvisation, that is to say, the lack of planning, can lead us to cover up the lack of structure with an excess of verbiage, to talk desperately. As if it were really the paradigm of the Spanish, we're here once again before the reality of a government lost in its own dreams, caught up in a raw and unexpected reality and unable to face up to it as it should. The remedy to cover up its negligence is that the president has resorted to hours of hollow talk in the repeated speeches that we should call, the Time of Sánchez.
The common point of all analyses of this government dominance in the media is that Pedro Sánchez has decided to be omnipresent, most likely as a consequence of the "absence of government" in decision making when the situation was already dire. They had to close the schools in the Community of Madrid and the Basque Country so that Moncloa finally decreed the alarm, although with another 24-hour delay. Thus, this abuse would be nothing more than a formula to cover up the initial lack of presence with over-exposure.
When nations are risking their lives, leaders have tended to strike an epic tone, as direct to the heart as it is clear to the minds of citizens, in order to achieve a common battle. Sánchez has opted for the opposite: a low tone, long and languid speech, whose epic only resides in phrases already used by other leaders (Churchill or Kennedy), without any contribution of his own beyond a kind of old-fashioned homily in which the listener ends up losing the thread, in the face of the lack of structure in the argument, which is unleashed in a spiral, repetitive manner and without clear points of information to hold on to.
Those who consider this to be a dismemberment of their advisors and speech writers in the face of the great crisis that Moncloa itself is experiencing, perhaps do not give enough credit to their worth. Probably the interest lies in the fact that they want to keep the audience lost so that they do not look for solutions, errors, precise data, or clear exits. Sánchez is forced to play this game of delay, resorting to a vaporous story where the battle of opposites, of responsibilities and consequences is eliminated.
Aware that the crisis is so devastating that it always devours those who have no solution on the bridge, Sánchez disrupts the discourse of death and the lack of a cure for the disease, with the technique of going off in circles, looking for different mini stories about the situation and resorting to the voluntarism of the solution that should be provided by the community, not by the leader: united, all together, among all... these are the terms that cover paragraph after paragraph of their speeches, without a doubt closer to the Bolivarian language of Chávez and Maduro, than that of the accurate oratory of the Kennedys or Lincoln.
Moncloa must have been clear that it had lost the first trump card of power: having the initiative in the face of the crisis due to its great delay in decision-making. Nor could it take the next step as a credit: offering the means to tackle it (no masks, no tests, no respirators...). It also came up against much more negative consequences than expected (the very high number of victims reflected in the saturation of the morgues and exceeding the world average of deaths per thousand inhabitants). Faced with such an accumulation of insurmountable negative elements, the official discourse has resorted to the spiral, continually changing focus and, of course, this formula is remarkable within the presidential speeches themselves.
Everything is talked about, but it is mixed up, it is talked about a lot, but without key points. The data is always obviated in order to offer them later, in a few days, when the situation becomes clearer...
Beyond the inconsistency of the presidential story from the beginning of the crisis and in the television appearances, everything seems to indicate that it is clearly a rhetorical distraction manoeuvre to face a crisis whose only advantage and disadvantage for the power is that it promises to be very long. Therefore, there is time to look for new speeches, to argue in different ways, to change the objective of the future: from health to unemployment, from the economic crisis to hoaxes, from the shortcomings of the past to the promise of a state-owned future, from the confusion of government to the pact between all...
In this "big talk", Sánchez and his advisors seek to avoid falling into the very net of their impotence, that of arriving late and lacking the means to solve this crisis of Herculean dimensions. Therefore, their conclusion would be that one cannot resort to finely elaborated speeches for the taste of rhetoric lovers, because there is no safer way to get out of the quagmire in this crisis that has come to power by changing the passage of the legislature in a radical way.
Instead of clear data and precise solutions, the president opts for a spineless discourse to avoid offering more weak sides to his critics. The best thing is to talk endlessly and talk without much substance. Sanchez's time is becoming more and more like Maduro's, perhaps on the advice of the great expert in empty revolutionary discourse who sits next to him as vice president, an advisor as we know of the Venezuelan regime. Talking a lot and saying the right thing seems to be the key to oratory to save himself.
Along with the excess of government presence, there have been clear threats of an attempt to muzzle the media with the announcement of decrees or rules "against hoaxes", the appearance of pro-government companies dedicated to controlling the networks or the shadow of censorship in the sociological analyses of the CIS. Plus subsidies seeking media affinity, as in the case of televisions watered by a few million at a time when resources are needed in other areas. Free hands for government communication and barriers to freedom of expression.
This is, without a doubt, "Sanchez's time", that is, the moment when a leader measures himself against the nation to get him out of a historical predicament. It should not be the time to monopolize the informative space and avoid criticism, which is not only the one that controls the government's action, but the one that helps to shed light on the solutions or on the mistakes or deviations that may be committed. The free press in a democracy is precisely to criticize governments. It calls for unity of action against the pandemic and wants to turn it into obedience to government decisions. It is time for Sanchez to demonstrate his capacity to govern and not just be a composer of political alliances. The years of Spanish disregard for empty debates must have passed. It is time for Spain, not for Sánchez, to face a future as clear as it is critical. We are all risking our lives, and on that path what must shine out is the democratic truth, not the assent to a leader whose worth is still being tested in his most important hour. It is, indeed, "Sánchez's time", but not to be occupied in a mere television talk, but to be measured against History.