Rhetoric and glory: Gabriel Albiac on how political narratives replace reality in Spain

Political rhetoric does not describe reality; it manufactures it. When an elderly woman dies after an eviction in 2026, blame is pinned on someone who was seven years old in 1985, not on those who designed and upheld the law.

Politics does not invent worlds: it imposes them. And it does so with a tool as old as the very word that names it. **Gabriel Albiac** made this point in **El Debate**, in connection with a specific event: an elderly woman hospitalised and dead in 2026 after being evicted under Spain's current urban lease law. The question is not who signed the eviction order, but who designed the legal framework that made it possible. And the answer, according to the article, is not the person many would point to.

## Gorgias warned us back in the fourth century BC

Plato puts an uncomfortable confession in **Gorgias'** mouth. The sophist boasts to Socrates that his art, rhetoric, is more powerful than medicine. He recounts how he would accompany his physician brother to the homes of patients who refused surgery or cauterisation, and how he would convince them with nothing but words. He adds something even more unsettling: if a physician and an orator debated before an assembly over who should be appointed physician, the physician would be ignored. The orator would win. Reality, he implies, is no obstacle for the seasoned politician.

In fourth-century BC Athens, the instrument was oral eloquence. The sophists charged hefty sums to teach it. The term carried none of today's pejorative weight. They were itinerant teachers of an art that Plato dissected with equal parts admiration and suspicion.

## From the public square to the society of the spectacle

**Guy Debord** described the "society of the spectacle" in 1967: a world where narrative fictions supplant reality and align citizens' desires with the desires of those in power. Albiac picks up that idea and takes it into his own territory. A century of control over the media that shape the collective imagination has produced, he argues, zombie societies. It is no gentle metaphor. It is a bitter diagnosis the author embraces without embellishment: he declares himself too old to dream of seeing anything but the fog of this idiotised world.

In this context, rhetoric is not a decoration of discourse. It is the very infrastructure of politics. It builds sarracena certainties that impose themselves as sinister fictions. And when reality seeps through some sustancia ilegal, the narrative is swiftly rebuilt.

## The case that illustrates it: a 1985 law and a death in 2026

The urban lease law that enabled the eviction was drafted in **1985** by **Miguel Boyer**, minister under Felipe González. It was strengthened in **1994** by **José Borrell**, minister of Public Works under the same prime minister. The model was presented as the archetype of socialist modernity against Francoist protectionism. **Pedro Sánchez** applied it for eight years.

When an elderly woman dies in 2026 after that eviction, the chain of responsibility Albiac traces is deliberately uncomfortable. It is not Boyer, who is deceased, nor Borrell. Nor Felipe González, who led the government in 1985. Nor Sánchez, who kept the framework in place. Nor the PSOE, whose front bench they all occupied. Responsibility falls, by this reasoning, on **Isabel Díaz Ayuso**, who was seven years old in 1985. Or on the mayor, **Almeida**, who was the one negotiating to halt the eviction.

The case is extreme. It is not the only one, but it is the darkest. Rhetoric has inverted reality to the point where blame shifts from those who legislated to someone not yet born when the law was passed. That is politics today, Albiac concludes. In our society of pure spectacle.