6th July 2019, there was tha annual demonstration/parade for the Gay Pride in Madrid, event that lasts for a week, being this actual day the biggest, as it was the one in which the whole parade and the demonstration took place from a week of movement through the whole centre of Madrid.
Madrid has become one of the Gay Pride capitals, to which lots of people from everywhere come to assist and see how we live this week. Most of it is organised by the LGTBIQ organisation, which makes a lot of effort for everything to be correct and coordinated, with the ¨help¨ of the Police.
Unfortunately, in Spain is quite normal to see political parties in this kind of events in defense of minorities which are being discriminated for different reasons, with the aim of gaining votes in an era of taking advantage of any possible option in order to sell a fake understanding of these minorities and to sell themselves to the media as ¨in defense of THIS people¨. This idea is based on a new concept which is getting importance this last years with the great raising of questions which were hardly silent in the past like feminism or xenophobia and racism: ¨positive discrimination¨. This concept explains how some use these new tendencies for their political projects, and to win acceptance and legitimacy throughout the whole population. For example, as the Socialist Party (POSE) did in Spain for last elections, presenting a whole ministry cabinet of women to show how feminists they are, when some of them were clearly not prepared (and even one of them copied her thesis).
That is, some of them were not chosen for their effectivity and knowing, but because they were women and they needed a change of image as the ¨socialists¨ they supposedly are.
In this case, as said before, we will talk about what happened to the political party ¨Ciudadanos¨ (Citizens) in this week, which was the main focus of the media after needed to be escorted by the Police being jeered, shouted, pushed, and finally obliged to leave.
The political party ¨Ciudadanos¨ is characterised by its (neo)liberal politics, based on a pro-Europe vision without an excessive focusing on reforms and progress, with a total and unquestionable defense of the State (against independencies), in favor of economical (and political) liberalism. We are talking about a party of which Reagan or Thatcher would have been extremely proud: helps to self-employees against possible helps to public servants, maximum help to the private sphere leaving as much as needed to the public one, in favor of absolute weapon market, legalizing marijuana, prostitution, or gay marriage.
This liberal paradoxical way of thinking in which ¨the personal progress of each individual must be the main objective of a State, thinking about his or her own benefit, being the State as far away as it can be from this process, assuring everyone to have this opportunity¨, has won a lot of acceptance after the supposing end of bipartidism in Spain with the appearance of Podemos as ¨the new left¨ from the 15-M movement, and the appearance of this other political party at the same time, organised by the catalonian Albert Rivera.
We could define his program as confusing: it is usually judged as a right-wing party, but they always (used to) define themselves as centred-democratic, concept which we could debate if it exists or not, which would be discussed on another article. After 5 years from their first appearance, everyone in the political party has been defined as ¨the orange weather-vane¨. This despective-offensive concept comes from the fact that they changed hugely and many times their political discourse, negotiating with those which they said they would never do, acting the way they said they were not, always arguing that they are doing it ¨for the prosperity of Spain, for the possibility of having a strong government, and for democracy¨. The word orange comes from the fact that is the referenced colour of the political party;
Nowadays, people have stopped trusting it by many factors. Their radical opinion against independentism (not forgetting that some of their chiefs are catalonian), has made people turn this political party to a more right-wing policy, and more now with the raising of it in Europe. It has been associated to the Partido Popular (PP) which are considered the conservatives, or even to the extreme right-wing party VOX in terms of unity of Spain. Recently, they showed they are not as pro-consensus and democratic as they were always saying, having similar discourses to the ones of the political parties mentioned before. This has made this party to lose lots of legitimacy, with a huge middle class asking themselves why to vote them if they are saying similar things to conservatives in many different matters.
Furthermore, since the appearance of this political party called VOX, the political situation in Spain has turned (even more) into a huge mess of ideologies and polarisation getting to urgent situations since last elections the 28th april, followed by the european ones and then the autonomic. This elections have made a need to negotiate with this political party, which has passed from 0 deputies and 33.000 votes four years ago, to 24 deputies and around 2.800.000 votes in this last ones.
Summarizing, taking into account that (probably because of a fear to this new extreme right-wing brand) the Socialist Party (POSE) won elections in most of occasions, PP, VOX, and Ciudadanos, had the need to get together in order to win to the left, as the Socialist Party was at the same time asking for allies to join him like PODEMOS and other pro-independent political parties like ESQUERRA REPUBLICANA, PNV or BILDU.
While the majority of new VOX voters come from the conservative party PP, which has been calified by them as the ¨Coward right-wing¨, CIUDADANOS´ voters are much more moderate, and many of them did not want their vote to be in a coalition with these other two forces, specially VOX.
Coming back to the Gay Pride, the right hand of Albert Rivera in CIUDADANOS called Inés Arrimadas, went with some deputies and other members and militants of the political party like at 17.00h to the Gay Pride demonstration as a political party (and not as individuals), with different big announcements like "Ciudadanos is going with the Pride".
With he just-explained political conflict in regions like Madrid or Murcia where the made a pact with the extreme right-wing, demonstrators decided to leave clear that Ciudadanos was not welcomed to the demonstration because of the hypocrisy they were showing. Regarding homosexual issues, VOX said that the Gay Pride should be celebrated in a far more distant place from the centre like for example Casa de Campo (a park far away from the city center), to not "disturb anyone who was not in favour of the demonstrations. I personally believe they were including themselves into that group.
Arrimadas and her whole team were escorted by the police to their main office, where she talked to different media talking about the "fascists" in the demonstration that made her leave. Basically, as this political party loves to do, they were victimizing themselves, lying and telling that people threw them things, being the police the one that admitted the only thing that it was throwed was an empty plastic bottle.
Liberal ideology as a concept in politics and IIRR has a serie of paradoxical and interpretative issues, which could make different perspectives regarding the ideology itself, or hypocrisies as well. It starts with a capitalist base in which the human being needs to maximize as far as possible his or her benefits, being the State the one that allows citizens to have this "opportunity". Besides, it comes from a Western-post-neoclassic optimism in which a maximizing of benefits will bring good for everyone, and at a long scale, it will bring international capitalist organisations like for example the already existing IMF (International Monetary Fund), with the final objective of institutionalizing these norms and guarantees for the good working of this maximizing of benefits for everyone.
Nevertheless, what it is clear is that Ciudadanos, more or less same way as its "leftish" friend Podemos, they both changed from a young and revolutionary (in their ways) political view against the existing bipartidism in Spain, with more future and long scale ideas with Europe and society, they finally came to be two more political parties playing the same game as the old ones. This situation opens the way for new political parties that still are not being considered, leaving us the citizens and voters a situation in which or you are 100% in with a party, or you just do not know who to vote or defend and you just ignore politics, which could be consider one of the worst mistakes in nowadays society: thinking that only people who study politics need to know about them.
