I am 60 years old and since democracy was restored in Spain, I have attended all elections. In the first occasions I voted with enthusiasm because I understood that the newly released democracy would mean a substantial improvement in our lives. Over time, disenchantment took hold of me and I only did it to avoid greater evils.
In these elections I was undecided with the position to take until I heard about Podemos. I visited their website and saw what their proposals were, the points that their deputies committed to fulfill, their way of working and understanding politics and their transparent accounting exposed on the Internet to the smallest detail. That caught my attention as something different, as a breath of fresh air that I had been waiting for a long time and that largely coincided with my aspirations. On Sunday I felt again the sensation, almost forgotten, of voting with enthusiasm.
I am not one of those who think that all parties are the same. In my opinion, the improvements that have been experienced are much more due to the left than to the right. I also do not think that all politicians are the same, I do not even consider those of the same party to be equal. Deep down there is always an individual responsibility in each of us that is what makes us different.
But it is no less true that the situation we have reached has no solution if we continue with the current state of affairs. We need far-reaching changes and not mere cosmetics. The Electoral Law is unfair, tax havens are not touched, corruption is rampant without being seriously persecuted, the powerful barely pay taxes, political parties have no legal obligation to fulfill their programs, their salaries do not follow the same scale as the base salary, the rights recognized in the constitution of housing, work, education... are becoming wet paper, there are privileges, there is no transparency and when a crisis of this capitalist system comes, it is up to the weakest and those of us who are not responsible for its creation to pay for it, tightening our belts and losing rights that we had managed to conquer so much.
And in the absence of a response from the parties, people have understood that the only way to achieve something is to get to work and fight for what belongs to us. This is how the 15M, the different tides, the PAH, the struggle of the preferred ones, etc. arise.
And meanwhile the traditional political parties, like a Seat 600 in the era of electric cars, believing that we are still illiterate, minors and that everything is solved with their smooth talk of blah, blah, ambiguous without saying anything, deceiving and always blaming the one in front.
I also recognize that the world has not been made like this by Martians, and that all the responsibility is not of the politicians, a part corresponds to each one of us, both for what we do and for what we do not.
Faced with all this, I wanted to add my vote to this breath to see if we can achieve, with the effort of many, that it becomes a breeze, wind and hurricane that over time (even if it is a lot and I no longer see it) gradually illuminates something new.
Diego Arrebola Gómez
