There are days when one sits down to watch The Handmaid's Tale and, between sips of coffee (or wine, depending on how the news comes), realizes that that totalitarian dystopia in which women are forced to give birth as if they were incubators with legs and human rights fit in a coaster... is not so far away. Not at least if one lives in the Spain of the Popular Party. Because what seemed like science fiction, it turns out to be dangerously similar to current politics, only without red tunics or white wings. For now.
Margaret Atwood's series is a scripted warning, a narrative slap about what happens when the far right disguises itself as "traditional values" and sneaks into power under the excuse of protecting the family, the homeland and the fetus. In other words, the same thing the Popular Party does when it says it is "moderate center-right", but then pacts with parties that believe that machismo is an urban legend and that women invent rapes out of boredom.
Center? What the PP has of the center is what I have of a Tibetan monk: absolutely nothing. They are as central as a prison: with ideological bars, 24/7 surveillance and punishments for anything that smells of diversity, critical thinking or civil rights. Because that's what bothers them: freedom. Sexual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom to decide about one's own body, freedom to love whoever you want without a Vox councilor coming to evangelize you with a Bible in one hand and a parental pin in the other.
In The Handmaid's Tale, not only are women's rights annulled: LGBTQ+ people are also persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. Because in Gilead, if you don't fit into the traditional family, you are a threat. Does that sound familiar? It does to me. Especially when I see how the PP happily pacts with those who consider homosexuality an ideology, diversity a danger, and rainbow flags an attack on morality. And meanwhile, Feijóo puts on a "I didn't do it" face, as if he didn't know who he sleeps with politically every night.
And do you know who would be commander in Gilead? Feijóo. With that little gray technocrat smile that smells of Excel without formulas and of an soulless office. The perfect showcase moderate: the one who beats his chest talking about the Constitution while signing pacts with the cavemen of the moment. The one who boasts of stability while opening the door wide to those who come to destroy social rights with an ideological chainsaw.
In The Handmaid's Tale, women lose their rights in the name of an extreme religious morality. Here, they try to take them away from us in the name of a silent majority that only exists in their internal surveys. The next thing will be to replace the "no is no" with "it's that you didn't respect yourself". Because with these people, involution is not an accident: it's the electoral program.
The Popular Party is not a centrist party. It is a party centered on itself, on its power, on its nostalgia for order, and on its chronic allergy to the freedom of others. They are the lords of Gilead, Iberia Express version, with a blue tie, a ponytail of accounts in Switzerland and the soul of censors. And the worst thing is that they believe themselves to be sensible, serious, the only ones who know how to govern. Yes, as they knew in the times of Cifuentes, Bárcenas and the master's degree of eternal life.
So the next time someone tells you that the PP is "centrist", ask them what center they are talking about: a shopping center of cassocks and hoaxes? Penitentiary center? Because what is the center of human rights... you won't find them there.
Gilead is not so far away. Only here, instead of being called that, it's called Génova 13. And they don't hand out tunics. They hand out positions.
