Every Day Is Worth Its Weight in Gold

One of the most banal frustrations of political life is the recycling of the same errors, as if history were a scratched record playing on loop. Spain seems to suffer from this with particular intensity. A discerning historian once reminded me of Ortega y Gasset’s famous axiom: “Pueblos que olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla” — “nations that forget their history are condemned to repeat it.” But right now, the repetition that most stings isn’t historical in scope — it’s incessantly daily. The striking fact about this government is that every single day it survives in power is worth its weight in gold.

That’s not to say Pedro Sánchez is merely hanging on by the skin of his teeth. Far from it. The idea that he “resists” misfortune or stumbles through crisis by accident is the narrative his camp wants us to believe. The truth is neither improvisation nor chaos. Every day he stays in La Moncloa is a calculated choice — a deliberate exercise in system redesign. The purpose is not governance: it is impunity.

This is the central lie of our moment: that Sánchez is reacting to events, launching scandals to bury scandals, or simply flailing. The opposite is true. He knows exactly what he is doing. Every appointment, decree, silence, and international trip is part of a coherent plan to entrench his power and make accountability increasingly impossible. There is no chaos — only strategy.

Put aside any given week and examine what happens with surgical precision. One day, the government commissions a controversial contract — say, hiring a firm to design a quasi-autonomous Catalan tax agency — knowing full well ordinary Spaniards will foot the bill while political partners reap the spoils. The next, the judiciary’s ability to investigate key allies is throttled. A day later comes a hiring boom in public employment. Meanwhile, favors are dispensed not on merit but on loyalty. And on a Sunday, with the papers closed, a family member quietly relocates to a country with no extradition treaty. Every day, a brick in the wall of impunity.

The institutional cost of each passing day is enormous. It is not just political capital being spent — it is the erosion of democratic structures: checks and balances neutralized, media voices muffled, public discourse saturated with disinformation. As with any regime approaching the twilight of legitimacy, what unfolds is not gentle decay but methodical occupation of the state apparatus. The presidency becomes less an office of governance and more a mechanism of perpetual survival.

Orwell’s insight in 1984 — “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future” — is being applied with a certain Iberian pragmatism: “Who controls the Official State Gazette (Boletín Oficial del Estado) controls history.” And the BOE burns daily with cascading norms, appointments, dismissals, subsidies, and opacity, each one altering the rules of political engagement.

This is no ordinary political drift. It is the creation of a clientelist architecture designed to survive beyond Sánchez himself — even if he falls, even if he is removed, even if he is defeated at the polls. By the time that hypothetical day arrives, the legal and bureaucratic scaffold of his design will be so deeply embedded that dismantling it will be nearly impossible.

What is the opposition doing in the face of this? Too often, it reacts — with indignation, with protest, with denunciations — but simply repeats itself. And in democracies, repetition is not always resistance; it can also be inertia. There is a slender line between raising the alarm and lamenting without effect. Meanwhile, one side keeps placing chips on the table, while the others argue about poker etiquette.

The danger before us is not a single scandal or headline — it is the accumulation of unchallenged days. Every day that passes is another day of system redesign that favors survival over representation, loyalty over merit, and impunity over accountability. And that day doesn’t have to be remarkable. It could be a Tuesday. A Friday. A Sunday. Just another day that, like all the rest, is worth its weight in gold — for those who crafted the plan, and increasingly little for those it claims to serve.