Sánchez has lied to us with the motorways and dual carriageways

The economic spokesperson for the European Commission, Veerle Nuyts, made it clear yesterday that the Spanish government promised to establish a toll for the use of Spanish highways and highways in 2024, one of the conditions, along with others, to receive the extraordinary funds from the community institutions.

Nothing we didn't know. And despite the fact that the government now says that it is trying to renegotiate this commitment, the truth is that Veerle Nuyts' statements confirm that Pedro Sánchez has lied during the campaign, since in the face-to-face with Alberto Núñez Feijóo he denied that this was true. We would add that like the rest of the candidates, only each one has chosen their own catalog of lies and half-truths. more or less as always.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the candidates have reveled in some statements knowing that they are inaccurate or false.. Nor is there anything new in that indignation spreads through neighborhoods, selectively, and that some are more annoyed by a hoax in the mouth of one candidate than a troll in the mouth of another. So far everything is more or less normal. But the innocence with which with absolute conviction it is exclaimed that nothing like it had ever been seen is new.. It will be that we have lived very little or that we have very little memory.

It is acceptable to get upset if you are openly lied to and you realize it. The work of unmasking the liar and checking their statements is also laudable if they are blunt statements made to win a dialectical battle in an electoral campaign. But being scandalized by a supposed novelty of the lie, as if one of the founding rules of politics had now begun to apply, certainly causes embarrassment.

“There has never been as much lying as today, nor in such a shameless, systematic and constant way.” The quotation mark is not from now. Alexandre Koyré wrote it in the short essay The Political Function of the Modern Lie, in 1943. Bad times, very bad. The text was underlined by Hannah Arendt to write Truth and Politics in 1967. We can go much further back. Plato already sang the excellence of political lies more than 2,400 years ago. It is true that it required a presupposition of goodness in its use, a noble aim to justify it. But who is the handsome man or woman who, in politics and particularly in electoral campaigns, does not believe they are in possession of that noble ideal that justifies everything?

More wood. In 1516, Nicholas Machiavelli published his best-seller on the exercise of politics. “All men are knaves and will break their word. You are not obliged to maintain yours either”, one way like another of prescribing the use of lies in politics. Cardinal Mazarin, in his Breviary for politicians, states that politics is the art of simulation and dissimulation. Of deceit, go. And also in the other part of the world, since ancient times, similar formulas were prescribed. Tsun Tzu, in The Art of War, gifts eternity with the affirmation that everything is based on deception.

It is true that there have been prescriptions to the contrary. Frederick II of Prussia, the philosopher king, tried in 1740 to combat Machiavellianism, which had made a fortune as a watchword of success in politics. Helped by his friend Voltaire, he published Antimachiavelli.. There we read: “It seems to me a terrible policy to act like scoundrels and deceive people; They can only deceive once, because then they will lose confidence “. beautiful sentence. But he himself did not pay attention. Advice I sell that I do not have. To summarize: new, new, the lie does not work. What does not mean that, every time we discover it, it does not deserve our disapproval and the signaling of whoever pronounces it.

How much truth does a man need? is the title of a book by Rüdiger Safranski that dives from a philosophical approach into the truth and existence of knowledge. Well then, politics, little given to philosophizing in the field of the abstract, has long since obtained the answer to that question.. How much truth do we need? Little to none on most occasions. Unless it coincides with our desires, beliefs and convictions. Perhaps the problem of political lies lies in our little or no willingness to listen to the truth that is not good for us or the nuance that forces us to make the effort to think.

In one of his best-known satirical lyrics, Quevedo pointed out: “Well, the bitter truth, I want to throw it out of my mouth…”. The political truth has the same flavor and for that very reason there are very few who want to listen to it. Hence, due to experience in the trade, the verses sound a bit rectified in the mouth of a politician: “Well, the truth is bitter, I swallow it and holy Easter.” That being said, Sánchez has lied to us about the highways.