Politics Of The Subjunctive

The world of marketing loves differentiation. "We are differentiating our product according to brand attributes in line with customer values, psychographics and demographics for the millennial generation and, going forward, for the post-millennial epoch." Or some such load of old nonsense. The world of politics doesn't love differentiation. Instead it loves unsorted clutter: whole loads of rag-tag, unkempt parties or groupings thrown on to a heap marked THE LEFT. This at least is what one has to conclude in Mallorca thanks to the emergence of something called Guanyem. What the hell is Guanyem? Those Catalan speakers among you will know. Guanyem. We win. Or, in the subjunctive mode, hypothetically we might win. One imagines they (we) mean the former.

We's are the flavour of the leftist month and months at present: Podemos, we can, we are able to. There is no additional subjunctive equivocation where Podemos are concerned. We can. Not, we might in theory be able to. Herein lies the differentiation perhaps. Guanyem aren't sure. Podemos are. But this still doesn't answer the question who the we-winners are. Let me explain. They emerged in Barcelona a couple of months or more ago, proclaiming that they were a "third way". Third way!? Where have we heard that before. They're not Blair in disguise, are they? On being launched, it was suggested that Podemos would be integrated within them. Together we can win, or something like this, I guess. If this was truly the case, then Podemos in a Mallorcan style hasn't been informed, as when Guanyem in Mallorca announced itself to the island last weekend, Podemos were apparently "indifferent".

Perhaps Podemos were smelling the rat of their thunder being stolen (if I'm allowed to mix idioms in such an abject fashion). Pablo Iglesias had after all appeared to go all soft and project Podemos as a social-democrat party, a bit of a third way in itself but with a Nordic flavour, which was all slightly odd. Hadn't Zapatero also taken the path of a part-Scandinavian "tercera via", his own third way?

It does, I'm afraid, all get terribly complicated. Left-wing parties here, left-wing coalitions there (or not), left-wing dilutions elsewhere. To describe the left as being cluttered is something of an understatement. The left is a wardrobe packed full of political textbooks and dialectics which when opened brings all this non-differentiation crashing down on a confused electorate, and one, moreover, which is likely to get increasingly turned off by the sheer volume that has been turned on by the left. Meanwhile, the Partido Popular can continue in blissful isolation on the right. Hypothetically, it should be capable of beating this pick 'n' mix of the left, but only in the subjunctive sense.