Alvise: salary raffle, aforamiento (special legal privilege) and officials jumping ship

Alvise promised to raffle off his salary and his officials jumped ship

The party that promised to raffle off its leader's salary among voters reached the European Parliament and, shortly afterward, began losing along the way the very people who were supposed to sustain it. It is the paradox that sums up Alvise Pérez's trajectory: a project born to channel disenchantment and that, according to the versions in circulation, ended up turning into a management problem when it came time to hand out posts. No structure lasts long if the first dissident is publicly portrayed.

The first scene people remember is not a rally. It is a leader celebrating his seat in a private room alongside El Pequeño Nicolás. Some maintain that everything was already said there. No need to know more.

The salary raffle nobody ever saw

The core of the message was simple and highly sellable: the MEP does not take a salary for himself; he raffles his paycheck among those who voted for him. It had a certain shock-value appeal. The problem, critics point out, is that the gesture worked as a slogan, not as a structure. A party is not a social media account, no matter how loudly you shout on it.

In the conversation, an unconfirmed calculation keeps coming up: the combination of his seat, the aforamiento (special legal privilege) and an allowance sustained over four years would turn the gesture into a fairly comfortable way of life. And a question nobody fully answers hangs over it: is that salary still being raffled, or did the raffle stop when it stopped being profitable to say it was being raffled?

Officials jumping ship and a staff that never comes together

That he failed to line up two names for a couple of minor posts is the most repeated reproach. The dominant diagnosis is that there is plenty of rhetoric and no organizational chart. An agitator can be an excellent MP and a terrible party leader; they are different trades, and the second requires withstanding the noise without breaking the toy.

The matter worsens when internal conflict is settled by airing data about those who disagree. How do you convince anyone to join if the first reproach ends up in a public display and a media bonfire? With that manual, the talent pool dries up before it exists.

To that is added the stampede of elected officials leaving without making noise. In a newly born party, every exit is twice as noticeable. The feeling that the boat is held up by one person and no rowers is hard to hide.

The mission to take votes from VOX

Here two incompatible narratives cross. For some, the goal was to steal votes from the right and smooth the path to government; for others, this party's voter does not come from conservative ranks, but from outright abstention. The latter have an argument at hand: people who never voted move a contingent that the traditional count does not add. And that contingent, by definition, is not something anyone is losing, because it was never there.

The pessimistic calculation is that the result stays at a handful of seats, insufficient to bring anything down and enough to divide. The optimistic one recalls that the same was said about other irruptions. Nobody has settled the account.

A vote of punishment and protest

The profile being drawn is that of people who would never go to the polls for a traditional party, or too young to have tried before, and who found in the name a way of saying enough. The name, at times, weighed more than the program. From there come the most volatile votes in the system.

It is worth saying without embellishment: whoever votes against something rarely repeats. Sustaining that base requires results, not gestures, and results are the only thing that is not raffled. The loyalty of the protest vote lasts as long as the outrage lasts.

Where the analysis gets stuck

The outcome remains open. Some keep a vote of confidence while waiting for the European seat to serve as a loudspeaker, and others already take for granted that the project will fade on its own. On social media, the character has generated a genre of impersonations all its own, and as a joke a supposed cryptocurrency has even been named after him. The question nobody resolves is where the next candidacy to fish that disenchantment will come from. Because that disenchantment is not going anywhere.