Municipal politics should be a mirror where the citizen sees themselves reflected without distortions. However, when the politician betrays their word to submit to directives from a distant party, that mirror breaks. While in large capitals abstract strategies are decided, in the city council tangible reality is managed. Therefore, when blind obedience to party acronyms is imposed, politics ceases to be service to become a poison that numbs the municipality.
This fracture becomes evident when a councilor votes in favor of projects that he knows are harmful (predatory urban planning, the closure of a socio-cultural center or unjustified fees), solely due to party discipline. At that instant, he is dynamiting the bridge that connects management with daily life.
By choosing survival in the hierarchy above the well-being of the neighbor, the representative becomes indistinct: he stops being his own voice to become a gray figure, an echo of slogans drafted without disguise in the distance
Under this model, municipal plenary sessions transform into a shadow theater. Arguments arrive written from a central headquarters and legislation is made on realities that are not trodden upon and problems that are not felt. It is the suffocation of proximity, the attempt to fit the complexity of a locality into a pre-cooked ideological mold.
In the bowels of the neighborhoods, betrayal does not always come with a great corruption scandal. It often proliferates in the lukewarm and icy silence of a commission. Betraying oneself locally is a form of civil suicide.
Unlike national politics, protected by high and opaque walls, in the municipality coherence is measured face to face. In proximity politics, when a councilor stops being a neighbor to become a soldier, democracy loses its most human root and the politician, their integrity as a guarantor of the everyday.
