In search of immunity they found impunity

Demonstrators hold banners during a protest against the military coup in Mandalay, Myanmar, on April 11.

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• Falsehoods and half-truths in the campaign

The health pandemic has an enormous political consequence in its wake: impunity. The rigorous examination of the management of democratic governments has yet to be done. Each electoral campaign, including the one in Madrid, is more noise than deep debate, far from accountability for poor management and the neglect of those most in need. The huge lines of hunger in poor neighborhoods, Christmas in an infra-residential suburb without electricity or hot water and the reform of elderly care have been left out of focus. But at least in democratic countries, debate with the opposition and media coverage allow for basic scrutiny. This is not the case in countries suffering from the authoritarian boot, in which these political consequences of the pandemic reach an insulting severity.We have become disinterested in the demands for democracy that led to the protests in Belarus and Hong Kong. The situation in these places has worsened, repression has increased and the desired freedom has been canceled by various forms of tyranny. Closer in time, the Burmese military dictatorship has crushed the revolts with enormous violence and has disrupted the fragile course of democracy in their country.

The Russian opponent Navalni, who survived the poisoning thanks to doctors from Germany, returned to his country to be imprisoned in extreme conditions. His hunger strike is linked to the increase in tension on the Ukrainian border. The conclusions of the international reports on the orderly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi have not elicited a commensurate reaction either. Not to mention the social movements that in so many parts of the world are condemned to impotence. To illustrate the paralysis of the great powers in the face of a bleak outlook, it is enough to look at the conflict of the protocol chair at the summit of the EU leaders during their visit to Erdogan in Turkey. Not only is there no room for accountability, there is hardly any room for the mere formality of sitting down and arguing.The health crisis threatens to take away the democratic demand and it is necessary to go back decades to remember such a constant cadence of coup attempts and limitations on the most essential freedoms.

In the troubled river, sinister characters like Bolsonaro or Trump before are not accountable for recklessness, rather on the contrary, they are reinforced their popularity by the pantomime of authoritarianism. Some want impunity to be identified with a solid and orderly form of government. It is this mental mechanism that enables this new coup dynamic. Citizens dream of achieving herd immunity, but at the moment many leaders only want the herd and if they talk about immunity it is to face controls, criticism and public scrutiny. If we continue down this path, when the mass vaccination campaign ends, one of the greatest spectacles of inequality that current civilization has given, a campaign to recover democratic values ​​in the world will have to begin.The inward folding of all developed countries leads to atrocities being committed in the open. On the way to immunity we stumbled upon impunity.