Political row in Spain over turning every tragedy into campaign ammo

When the corpse becomes a slogan

There is a scene that repeats itself and that almost nobody dares to name: leaders of every stripe stepping onto the same tragic stage with their speech already written before the forensic teams arrive. The reproach is an old one and cuts across the entire political spectrum. PP, PSOE and Vox appear in the same sentence, with no hierarchy, whenever profiting from other people's grief comes up. The accusation does not distinguish between parties: it points to a method.

The diagnosis from the street is that Spanish politics has turned misfortune into electoral raw material. It is not an isolated impression. The underlying suspicion is that the minute of silence has become a campaign event and that condolences are dispensed according to the calendar.

The 11M as a precedent nobody lets go of

The reference to the 11M (the 2004 Madrid train bombings) appears as the founding episode of this way of doing politics. The claim is that it marked a before and after in the handling of the narrative and that since then Spain's political class operates with a brazenness not seen in other countries. The assertion is sweeping and debatable, but it explains why the reproach is not aimed at just one party.

The underlying argument is that the exploitation of victims is not a one-off accident but a mobilisation tool refined over two decades. Those denouncing it today from one side have usually practised it before from the other.

The reproach that turns on the one who throws it

The conversation soon turns. Several replies remind the original poster of past episodes and point out that their outrage has arrived late. The accusation is thrown back: whoever denounces the partisan use of a tragedy may be doing so, precisely, out of partisan calculation. The result is a loop in which nobody admits to having used the victims and everyone sees the other side doing it.

Some even take the reproach to a personal level, attributing a specific ideological allegiance to the original poster in order to discredit their criticism. It is the classic mechanism: if the messenger carries a party card, the message is worthless. The consequence is that the debate over the exploitation of the dead becomes, itself, another piece of that exploitation.

The one consensus that exists: they all disgust us

Paradoxically, the only point of agreement is the most pessimistic one. The idea that the political class as a whole provokes revulsion appears again and again in different formulations. Nobody is spared. The criticism does not distinguish between government and opposition: it is aimed at the entire system, perceived as a machine that needs corpses to function.

That consensus is a trap. It serves to avoid having to choose, to avoid pointing to specific responsibilities, and to leave the complaint in the limbo of generic indignation. When everyone is equally guilty, nobody is.

The question left hanging

If the electoral exploitation of grief is so obvious and so widely condemned, why does it still work? Perhaps because the electorate, while denouncing it, also responds to it. Or perhaps because the reproach has become the most profitable gesture of all: the one that allows you to be outraged without giving up your own narrative.