Does lying have an electoral cost?

turn for messengers. Carlos Alsina's question to Pedro Sánchez, “why do you lie so much, president?”, has had the unexpected effects of a cluster bomb. With special prominence of the media establishment which, after all, is the best sounding board for political debate.

The messengers have turned the final stretch of the campaign into a contest of demerits between the incumbent Sánchez and the candidate Núñez Feijóo about who lies more and better. With exchangeable result at the polls on Sunday.

I am afraid from the outset that, if the defense of the “change of position” is not worth it, the “inaccuracy” of the data handled will not be worth it either.. After all, the two burladeros are part of the processes of deformation of the truth. This is where both the “anti-fascist alert” of the left and the “vote you Txapote” of the right fit..

The polls also fit, creators of artificial states of opinion. Let's see the ones that are circulating on the eve of election day. They are so different, so shockingly disparate, and so shockingly the same with those who order them, that one of the two scenarios available in the demoscopic field is consciously lying to us..

These reality-distorting processes are, in my opinion, inherent to political discourse, which should be a noble task of service to others, but in fact it is carried out as an impostor's trade. Not professionalized, in the Albert Boadella way (imposture is a rewarded merit in the case of actors), but with the clumsiness of amateurs.

In truth, in this singular sack race, the President of the Government has a great advantage over the leader of the PP, although that would already be discounted in the polls.. What is new is the media accusation of Feijóo (from Carlos Alsina to Silvia Intxaurrondo and I shoot because it's my turn) as a good competitor of Sánchez in the art of lying, against his initial anti-Sanchista refrain: “In politics, you are there so that the truth defeats the lie.

While I am caressed by the violin music that this phrase from the leader of the PP demands, I maintain that the lie has no electoral cost because it has been normalized in the future of Spanish politics. It must be analyzed as an isolated ingredient in the analysis of public discourse.. And if we could do it, we would discover that its impact at the polls would be neutral on the respective electoral billing of the different candidacies.. Because the lies of the block on the right compensate those of the block on the left, as well as the respective successes and errors.

Ergo, zero electoral cost after a campaign debased by the trivialization of lies, insults and artificial climates of opinion. And because, as Muñoz Molina says in a highly commented article (“The era of vileness”), trivialization blocks critical awareness in the face of insidiousness and the usual exchange of poisonous stones in the struggle for power. Too bad that the signer of this excellent article only detects those that go in one direction.

All the precautions are few to prevent the strongly contaminating idea of the Spain of good people in a state of permanent alert against the Spain of bad people from slipping into the keyboard of the opinion maker.