With the summer season comes the endless afternoons of swimming in Papagayo or Famara with salty sunsets. Sweetening our nights sitting on the sidewalk at home with a watermelon from Soo or an ice pop from Tinajo. The heat also brings those friends who once in their lives decided to live away from home and with them it is an unwritten law to enjoy the pilgrimages, parties and festivals of the small towns of our land. In the summary of all this there is usually also a summer love that will end in a walk through the little cars of San Ginés while eating a pine cone of peanuts.
All of the above is not an excerpt from an RTVC novel that highlights the value of the Canary Islands during the summer months, it is a summarized definition of what a summer in Lanzarote is. In 2023 everything changed and one of our most unique visitors, the one who has decided to put the town where the wind is made, Costa Teguise, on the map of the national agenda, came up with the idea in an almost unplanned maneuver to call elections. National elections on July 23 when people are more concerned about the tortilla to take to the beach than what a much reviled political class decides; society wanted these elections to pass and that's it. Not to mention the territorial leaders of the parties, who arrived exhausted after some revulsive municipal elections.
As if it were the title of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, many of us thought it was going to be the chronicle of a death foretold, the political death of our beloved Pedro Sánchez. In the end, it turned out to be the elections of uncertainty and we were left worse off than we were.
If we analyze the Congress we have the party of the lady who irons who in addition to eating her own party to be the candidate for the presidency lowers in number of seats to that extreme left that has nothing to do with the movement that was in Sol and the main support for a "progressive government" as if Spain only progressed with them. On the opposite side is the horseman of the apocalypse who has cost him several seats to believe that the autonomies can be dissolved like a sugar cube or the moral superiority that he flaunts to define the good and evil of a country. In my town it would be said that he was left composed and without a boyfriend because he looked very happy in a blue armchair with the most popular paying homage to him.
Spain has always been a quiet country. Electorally, it likes to move in the center and there we find the kings of polarization and bipartisanship: a PSOE that went out to burn all its ships (all but the Falcon) with the hope that summer elections and the European presidency would help them save the furniture that I already believe they did, against all odds, but they did. The expected Galician and winner was, he was more knocked out than with a blow from Urtain to see that the Basque right was not going to support a government that included extreme rights. Reflection should be made by the members of the terns because I do not think that Génova will support a new internal division even more if possible when they have won an election.
Then there are the others in Congress, who are not so other when the governability of Spain and respect for the Constitution is in their hands. The Basque left and Catalan independence are the Eve of our Pedro offering him the apple of power in exchange for a referendum for independence. Teruel this time did not exist for the longed-for red armchairs of the San Jerónimo race, a different thing was the Canary Islands, where Cristina Valido can resurface like the Phoenix after four years of her departure as a councilor of the GobCan.
Canarian nationalism should take a package of munchitos and a Clipper to sit down and think about where we want to go, especially Mr. Román Rodríguez. The gentleman of the fan grew after being four years sitting next to the jinx president; he also believed that, adding without laying the foundations well, any municipal platform that took a coffee with them was going to sweep the Canary Islands. The reality is that he swept, but in his house and little else, running out of seat with a skew to the left impossible to erase in a month and have the foresight to go hand in hand with Coalición Canaria. Those of Clavijo, who have managed to make the stars shine thanks to the successor of the seemingly irreplaceable Ana Oramas and the quesadillas of El Hierro, we should be able to denounce them because after months of lifting truck wheels in the paleo comes the time to premiere the bikini and see who says no to a Tirma chocolate bar.
Well, that is the cambalache that there is in Madrid and with a monumental rise in the prices of things, I thought that they were going to stay where Ayuso to fix things, but they go on vacation and in a few weeks the Mareta is occupied with our beloved Pedro. I would take him to the pilgrimage of Caleta de Famara to see if with Laje inviting him to a piece of dry old woman he gets rid of the silliness and to form a government he does not count on breaking the Constitution, he might even learn what are the migratory routes of the country.
Political arithmetic is what it is and plays in all senses, but after what Spain has lived and the clear decline of the extremes why having to count on them can be so expensive for the country, to the point of very probably having to call elections again. Obviously what I try to capture in this opinion article with all the irony that I can think of is the weariness that citizens feel of politics thanks to the fact that some politicians insist on entangling while the middle class continues to drown in taxes and many citizens must choose between putting gasoline in the car or buying more meat and fish in the monthly shopping.
So without being an expert in anything I give you an advice: enjoy every second of the summer, of friends, of saltpeter, of food, of the little moments, of our island, of the patron saint festivities and, why not, of that summer love that you can surprise if they are lovers of political conspiracy telling him "Kiss me until SUMAR is only a mathematical operation and VOX only a dictionary".
