The Creative Tension Of Government

A year ago, I wrote an article entitled "We Can Collapse Governments". It was about Podemos: We Can. In it I suggested that a coalition, formed from PSOE, Més and Podemos, "could be thrown into chaos or could collapse". It was prophetic, one might say, in being more than just a suggestion of possibility in the future. The past tense of the modal "can", i.e. "could", was an indication of what Podemos is turning out to be. The positivity of "we can" is being replaced by the conditions of "we could". Podemos, the party of the conditional. We could, if you were to agree with us.

Podemos, the advocates of openness, dialogue, participation, shroud all this with confrontation. It is to their credit that they don't just swear blind allegiance to a government of which they are nominally a part, but of which, in truth, they are apart. One wondered why they didn't wish to formally join the Balearic government, but now this is becoming clearer. On the outside but still vital for giving Armengol a majority, they can challenge and confront without being subjected to the admonishments of the opposition that would come from formally being within government. It's clever, but how good is it for the smooth operation of government?

It is increasingly evident that the real power within Podemos in the Balearics is Laura Camargo, the parliamentary spokesperson. This was suspected to be so before Alberto Jarabo was selected as leader and now it is being confirmed. Recently, Camargo spoke of the tension within government. Creative tension. It was a good thing.

This reminded me of a situation years ago as a senior manager. One of the company's owners and so a board member was the principal brains of an organisation littered with academic eggheads. He once spoke in glowing terms of the value of creative tension, something that he and the board were engineering, to which I suggested that there was plenty of tension and not enough creativity. It was a company with a highly political culture, and within this culture if there was no one to manage or moderate the process of this creative tension, which there wasn't, then the consequences would be as they proved to be. Fierce arguments conducted within an ill-defined framework that left some highly disaffected.

One of the many buzzwords surrounding government at present is consensus. Read more or less any report and you will find reference to it. Consensus, though, requires some compromise. It isn't achieved by the confrontational nature of creative tension, unless there is someone to moderate the process. And there isn't.

Mariano Rajoy has referred to Podemos as an experiment. He was right but not in the way that he meant. Podemos are a concept which renders a definition of them in terms of a conventional political party largely meaningless. They are an abstraction chiselled principally from the walls of academia, a world in which argument is everything. Hence, creative tension is deemed a good thing, even if it fails to achieve the desired consensus.

Attractive though Podemos are as an alternative to largely discredited political parties, the confrontational style may lose them more friends than it gains. A company's struggles with creative tension are shielded from the public. A government's is not. They were right to challenge the appointments of Juli Fuster and Pau Thomàs and to support the Partido Popular in the charges of PSOE nepotism, and they will have gained admirers for having done so, but what further confrontations will there be? And might the viewing public begin to take a negative view of constant arguments between those who are supposedly meant to be partners?

It is most unlikely that either Fuster or Thomàs will be removed from their respective posts as director-general of the regional health service and as advisor to the employment ministry. The defeat of the government, by which one means PSOE and Més, was an embarrassment, but the result of the vote will not, one would think, claim Fuster and Thomàs. But it was more than just an embarrassment, as it revealed the divisions brought about by the Podemos desire for creative tension. PSOE have taken a hit and so have Més. A year ago I was suggesting that Més, because of experienced campaigners such as Biel Barceló and Fina Santiago, might play the moderating role, but though Barceló has said that Fuster's appointment could be viewed as being somewhat questionable, he and Més have stayed loyal to the pact with PSOE. They are as much in Podemos's firing-line as PSOE.

But how can there be a government in which issue is taken over almost everything? Consensus cannot be attained under such circumstances, and the stridency of Laura Camargo is such that she has in effect thrown down the gauntlet to Armengol to break the far from solid foundations of the pact. Then what?