Architects of Chaos

The media have had their main gurus on vacation for a few days now, and tensions have eased, confirming, unlike what was felt a few weeks ago, that the world wasn't coming to an end. Perhaps what some were so tensely promoting was basically a renewed government in Spain before August.

They didn't get their way, once again stumbling against a resilient (though undoubtedly eroded) Pedro Sánchez. But this renewed "media blackness" (which Felipe González once pointed out and with which the former president now colludes) is undoubtedly a prominent part of the "architects of chaos" that President Puigdemont warned about this weekend.

They won't let Sánchez govern in peace, but they won't let Puigdemont return.

In a first reading, the Junta leader referred to extreme parties that offer simple (and false) solutions to major problems. He didn't name them, but journalists covering the event identified Podemos, the CUP (Union of the People's Party), Vox, and the Catalan Alliance. Even so, the former president's barb went further.

And there are architects of chaos, agitators, or troublemakers—there are politicians, but also media, judicial, and police figures. And there are, without a doubt, political-media-judicial-police figures, like many of the offensives of recent months, which have joined forces, as in the days when Felipe suffered campaigns against him (before joining them against Sánchez), to shake the foundations of the state and provoke a change of government.

But now Puigdemont is clearly pointing the finger at them and their actions, because long before Sánchez suffered them, the Catalan independence movement suffered them. And the president, especially, is still suffering from them without being able to return to his country, which is much worse than not being allowed to govern it with a minimum of calm, as is the case with the current tenant of the Moncloa Palace.

Because what we've been experiencing for years isn't a war of ideas, but rather a cultural, institutional, and emotional battle in which some have the license to set everything on fire without paying the price for what they've destroyed. This cross-party impunity, which is equally sheltered on television sets and in robes, has eroded the democratic pact to the point of making it unrecognizable in certain trenches.

There's much talk of regeneration, but few dare to ask who the system's degenerators really are. Because it's not just about who governs, but who sets the limits of what can be governed. And that's where the architects of chaos build with the precision of goldsmiths, designing narratives, sowing distrust, and fueling the feeling that everything public is flawed, useless, or corrupt. And this isn't done only in the chambers.

It's a tragedy of our times, but with echoes of the same ones we've had since the Greeks. Now, for example, with broadcasters disguised as gods who play with everyone's destinies from their media Olympus. And if in that mythological era, characters like Icarus fell for flying too high, now there are those who eagerly seek to make their hated ones fall far enough for them to emerge. Not only in politics.