Modern politics has managed to perfect an art that even the most crooked hair-growth seller would envy: that of the scam with a protected designation of origin and legal blessing.
Every time elections approach, political parties unfurl those monuments to science fiction called electoral manifestos. They are beautiful, glossy catalogs full of solemn commitments drafted under a maxim as old as cynicism itself: promise until you get in, and once you're in, forget what you promised.
In real life, selling hair growth tonic knowing it will make you bald is punished in the duty court. In Parliament, it is rewarded with an official car.
The impunity of premeditated deception enjoys iron health and a venerable genealogy in Spain. Those who today are scandalized by the present-day U-turns forget that the instruction manual was written by the classics.
It is impossible not to recall Felipe González and that rhetorical balancing act of "NATO, not at first," which mutated into an enthusiastic "yes" as soon as he settled into the Moncloa Palace. Years later, Mariano Rajoy raised the bar of programmatic transformism by promising a massive tax cut only to, upon stepping into the Council of Ministers, perpetrate the biggest VAT increase in recent history. In both cases, the response was the same: "circumstances force us." The fault, of course, is never the liar's, but reality's, which is very stubborn and does not allow itself to be governed.
Today the technique has been refined to nausea. We are witnessing campaigns that operate as genuine exercises in mass deceptive advertising, where what is planned to be liquidated in the first investiture pact is signed before a notary. Public housing that is never built is promised, laws are promised to be repealed that are later kept intact, and uncrossable borders that become porous the day after counting the seats. The fascinating thing about the matter is that our courts, always so rigorous with the contract for a defective television, wash their hands of democratic fraud. Protected by the constitutional prohibition of the imperative mandate, judges repeat that the electoral manifesto is not a binding contract. In other words, the citizen goes to the polls deceived by textbook fraud, but justice tells them that planned lying is perfectly legal.
This legal anomaly has turned suffrage into a gamble where the house always wins. The politician designs a fraudulent offer to alter the voter's will and, once their purpose is achieved (the spoils of power), they appeal to "resilience" or "change of cycle" to justify the betrayal. They then tell us, with insulting condescension, that the punishment will come in four years at the ballot box. But by then the institutional damage is already done, the budget plundered, and social patience exhausted.
A democracy that normalizes lying as the most profitable tool for governing is not a mature democracy; it is a consented farce where citizens pay for the party and the tricksters keep the change.
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