Manuela Carmena: "When there are advances in the world, there are usually attempts to stop them"

"Whenever you want to do something, you have to consider that there are obstacles, and it cannot be the algorithms, nor the possibilities of economically very powerful sectors that prevent us from using those means that are at our service," says the judge

February 27 2025 (12:37 WET)
Updated in February 27 2025 (12:47 WET)
Manuela Carmena. Photo: RTVE.
Manuela Carmena. Photo: RTVE.

The judge, former mayor of Madrid and co-founder of the platform Judges for Democracy Manuela Carmena has spoken this Thursday morning on the radio station Radio Lanzarote-Onda Cero, on the occasion of her visit to Lanzarote to participate in a roundtable of the Workers' Commissions that will be held this Friday, February 28 in San Bartolomé.

 

Question: How do you assess the political and social moment we are experiencing in Spain and in the world?

Answer: There is always an approach that has positive and negative aspects. A great positive aspect is that the world is achieving more rights. There are some advances that are surprising, for example, how illiteracy has decreased or how a very important decrease in infant mortality is being achieved.

Although it may not seem like it, the world is advancing, but history tells us that even if there are great advances in the world, there are usually attempts to stop those advances. That's how it is, it's the history of the world.

Democracy is the most reasonable and egalitarian system to govern the world and that is what emerges from the great conquests, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which speaks of a concept that I think is important to remember, when talking about the human family.

Sometimes attitudes of confrontation are generated because there are sectors that understand or consider that inequality gives them more capacity, more power or a situation of arrogance, then there are situations of attempted regression. Now we are living a moment of attempts of regression and now the important thing is to know where we are and to know how we can take care of democracy.

 

Question: What has happened so that citizens, in several countries around the world such as the United States, have given power not to politicians but to these big businessmen?

Answer: It is more interesting to see how sometimes democratic procedures rust and are harmed. I believe that to the extent that we are not able to control the truth, that is, to the extent that we are not able to prevent political discourse from being based on the crudest lie, we are giving an image that necessarily makes it seem that the electoral procedure is wrong.

If, for example, I say something that is untrue and I say it from politics, from any of the platforms from which we find political leaders, I am wrong about the diagnosis of society and with a wrong diagnosis, I am also wrong about the will of the citizens.

 

Question: What does the left have to do to recover the political space?

Answer: It would be very arrogant on my part to say what the left has to do. I believe that all citizens must defend and take care of our democracy. For me it means that the citizen has more prominence. The citizen feels that he is indifferent to power, the great bureaucracies hinder that vision that we public servants are really public servants. Sometimes it seems that the administration, the government, could be the protagonist, being the citizen the protagonist.

I believe that these are important reflections to put the individual citizen, the citizen to whom the Declaration of Human Rights refers so much, back as the true protagonist of the political processes.

 

Question: In the series 'The Lawyers' (RTVE) [where the story of the lawyers Manuela Carmena, Cristina Almeida, Paca Sauquillo and Lola González is remembered] you can see the left-wing parties in the street all day, where the people who needed it found that support. Today there are people who go to far-right parties. Will we have to start taking to the streets as in that era?

Answer: Today we have to do things differently. It doesn't seem good to me that the young people of today try to copy what was done years ago. Technology, the world is advancing in such an absolutely rapid way that I believe that it gives enormous possibilities for the people who are now in full youth or maturity to be aware that you have to look for other ways of claiming rights and maintaining democracy.

Therefore, really, don't look to the past. Design the future, that is, be able to say we are going to create a different future in which the citizen, the individual, the human being has to be the protagonist.

 

Question: Precisely when you were mayor of Madrid you strongly promoted citizen participation. Now we also have very easy tools. It is true that there is a dark side to everything we are seeing with the internet, with artificial intelligence, everything that is coming to us, but the positive side is the ability to know exactly and to be able to participate with those tools.

Answer: Of course, I think it's impressive. I was, for example, once retired doing a stay in the People's Republic of the Congo and I was surprised that a country that has so many problems of inequality and in which effectively there are areas that we can say have a very, I don't know, very precarious development, everyone has a mobile phone. What can be done with communication with mobile phones from one city to another, from one town to another, from one factory to another, is immense, and I think we have to look for new ways.

Those of you who are going to be the protagonists of the following years, you have to be looking not so much to continue thinking that you have to go out into the street, that you have to do demonstrations, maybe you have to do other things. Things that, as you well suggest, arise precisely from the great possibilities that science, technology and a greater capacity for communication between the world have today.

 

Question: If the algorithms let us. The algorithms of the big companies, of the technocaste that has been called now.

Answer: Well, whenever you want to do something, you have to consider that there are obstacles and it cannot be the algorithms, nor the possibilities of economically very powerful sectors that prevent us from using those means that are at our service.

 

Question: Precisely something that is hurting democracy is hoaxes. You have been one of those who, in the terrible time of COVID, won a battle against Alvise Pérez for lying and assuring that you enjoyed a personal respirator. The problem is that the hoax runs faster and reaches more people.

Answer: We have to look for more agile instruments, it cannot be that to get a sentence four years have to pass and that to execute that sentence it takes who knows how long. Nor can it be that when someone lies, let's say, voluntarily and does so precisely to give that panorama that has nothing to do with reality, the penalty is to pay an amount that is almost ridiculous. Alvise was condemned for having lied in the way he lied to pay 5,000 euros, it is ridiculous.

What we have to look for is to look for rigid, judicial and non-judicial structures that have to have a very dynamic scope to ensure that the truth is immediately restored. Then we will see who has to pay the responsibility for having lied, but we have to start thinking that if one, from your computer, your phone, from any of the networks, whatever it is, lies, you have to be responsible for that lie because right now not only are you journalists who must comply with the Constitution when they talk about the right to the truth, any person who uses communication networks becomes like a pseudo journalist or disseminator and has the same obligations to tell the truth.

So we have to end anonymity on the networks, I think that is one of the most important objectives and the second, once anonymity is over, each person has to know that he is responsible for telling the truth and that if he lies he has to pay the consequences.

 

Question: Finally, Madrid Central has not been able to be removed.

Answer: Well, not only that, but it has been recognized and I think that it is very interesting to see a little how public policies are and how precisely in the framework of public policies it can do a lot of damage to lie about them. It seems that it surprises me, but when you remember the slogans of what was at that time the campaign of the Popular Party that said: "The day after we take the government, Madrid Central is over, right?". And when it has been done just the opposite, I think that evidences what I referred to before when saying that when democratic politics lies, it hinders, it obsesses and the electoral conclusions do not really respond to the feelings that the citizens have.

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