Coins, the Lisbon alchemist – Observer
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The novel by Ciclovia da Almirante Reis, in Lisbon, deserves to be followed from the point of view of political science and what it represents for the current condition of the Portuguese democratic system. We have here, in fact, an example of electoral campaigns in which everything is promised to everyone with a federal view to short-term electoral benefits. In the urge to get a gate, all the discontented war results will be slammed in a sack, all the people how to take life in a public result war, all the city control batteries and all the disconnected wars of Lisbon and, whoops, We have a package to present to the elected and reap political benefits.
With this populist package, in which you say “yes” to everything without consequences, contradictions, financial support (“how much does it cost?”) or impossible to be legal (“are there commitments that are being violated?”) we make a bag of irreconcilable bad-tempered cats that we present electorate and with which to choose a tangential victory.
Coins do not believe to wait as hopes, like most, in all the polls that they were reading throughout the campaign and where it always appeared to win as intelligent in the campaign, so, and being a man very say of the campaign, I knew that it was impossible that yes. everyone and, at the same time, carry out everything he was promising but, despite that, he promised everything to everyone. He promised to build a #Moedotopia where everything was given to, where parking was created and at the same time suppressed, he promised to make bike lanes and end them at the same time, he promised heaven and earth and turn lead into gold.
But now that a promising solution has been won, we show the result of this promising solution: nothing to present or, in the case of Almirante Reis, so first to the bicycle lane model: a bad model that was abandoned and transformed into the best possible one, which was the one that allowed short duration without blocking the road and which could only be followed by an august idea by Livre to uproot the central row of trees to start an installation for a party that wants to get worse. Returning to “Ciclovia 1.0”, Moedas slapped his face and was sold his vote in exchange for “starting up” the cycle lane and made us think: what kind of democracy is this where promises are made that you know cannot be kept? What does this mean for the proper functioning of Portuguese democracy? Is it enough to punish these electoral failures at the polls, waiting four years for this desynchronized form of electoral justice?
What Coins the alchemist did, the transmuter of discontent into vows, was unfortunately neither new nor something that was last done. But what has contributed and has contributed to reduce trust in political parties and will further erode the representativeness of and increase abstention that tends to asphyxiate the democratic system. Like Mo, parties must and must be much more careful how to execute, thus creating in the least the capacity to carry out candidates (fair) from a feeling of illusion towards their proposals and towards their promise to make. work. It must also keep a real-time record of the status of compliance with the same and of the obstacles and difficulties that are present and that prevent their proper execution. If they don’t, we must build a “promisometer” capable of doing it for them, so that they register an imperative need to contain this promissory diarrhea and democratic mandates.
It is equally true that political parties respond to this new challenge with a hyper-simplification of discourse, whether to recover that electorate lost to Left or Right extremism and to populism, or to feed the insatiable voracity of the media every increasingly simplifying and incapable of producing in-depth information and “so that citizens can decide for more tendentious, always, to more similar hype” and equally “news” as “news” (and this is particularly visible in the question) from Almirante Reis) . This means, however, that, by deciding to rebel against the crisis of representation, a crisis of confidence, by simplifying their proposals, by their multiplication and lack of realism, the parties increasingly reject themselves from the concrete reality of society and of reality Until it increases and increases, increasing, the tendency to increase, the tendency to delays and compromises, will always increase to deadlines, or never, to increase, to increase, to deadlines and deadlines, not even to increase, they can increase in the long run, it no longer sweats to make an abstention.