Democracy and self-defense

Democracy as we know it is facing a challenge with enormous consequences.

There is great confusion.

It is not clear to me that it is good for the US higher courts to finally decide that Donald Trump cannot run for office for the crimes of inciting the assault on Congress.

And I'm not clear about it because I don't like it being the judges who decide who can be voted for and who can't.

One of the wonderful conditions of democracy is that it allows the citizens of a country to even inflict self-punishment.

Not allowing a candidate to run reminds me of Venezuela.

A failed government has poorly argued that the opposition's chosen leader is unfit to stand in elections.

She reminds me of Russia, where Putin's opponents with a chance of beating him are imprisoned or have been murdered.

It reminds me of Nicaragua, which persecutes opponents and critics.

It reminds me of El Salvador, which has voted absolute power for one person in exchange for security on the streets.

It reminds me of Senegal, where young people leave because there is no stability for political alternation.

We are talking about nominal democracies.

I like more what has happened in Brazil or Poland.

Where in the face of ultranationalist governments, the opponents have managed to defeat them at the polls.

I like better what happens in Spain, where an effort is made, even if it is torturous and painful, so that a candidate voted for in the Catalan elections returns from his escape and can present himself normally.

An effort, by the way, that the PP would have also undertaken if its sums had allowed it.

That would have saved us the rivers of ink of those who see the amnesty as a breach of legality when it is rather a resource for democracies to strengthen themselves.

In general, I think that offering the electorate the broadest and least restricted list of candidates is a good thing.

However, in Germany they are seriously threatened by an ultra-nationalist and racist party that is rising in voting intentions.

In the United States they want to protect themselves from a criminal candidate, who has also already tried to reverse the electoral result that removed him from the White House.

In Spain, the majority of the population accepts an amnesty for the participants in the Catalan separatist process, but they would like to see their leader pay for the crimes he committed, which are too similar to an exercise in textbook Trumpism.

The question in the face of these challenges is what the hell we do.

No democracy resists the lack of civic education in favor of excessive media coverage.

Trump and Milei are pure television products, let's not forget.

A democracy needs to generate a public space of respect and responsibility.

He has to free the institutions of control from partisan suspicion, he has to recover faith in the division of powers.

It requires citizens who are educated, trained and capable of analyzing reality without being afraid of it, without demanding paternalism.

A democracy cannot be built on societies bathed in a magma of crossed grudges where some give a damn about the fate of others.

That's when the answer gets complicated.

How do we turn around this process of brutalization that is caused, among other things, precisely by the democratization of information channels?

Well, back to school, I'm afraid, where all the evils and goods of our system come from.

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