Sánchez and 1984: the soft control that needs no tanks

Sánchez's techno-feudalism: less Orwell, more Maduro lite

Showing your ID card at Lidl to buy bread. What used to be a dystopian joke has become, for part of the political analysis, the perfect metaphor for where the Government's control model is heading. There is no thought police with batons, but there is a relentless drip of mechanisms tightening the noose: chat control 2.0, the hate footprint, content verification, mandatory digital identity to access basic services. Each step, presented as protection, closes the pincer a little more.

The mechanisms of wishy-washy control

The analogies with the novel 1984 fall short if you are looking for the trappings of the Two Minutes Hate and Newspeak. Those who analyse the Government's policies point out that the real parallel lies not in the aesthetics but in the methods: control of language through the constant redefinition of terms such as "hate speech" or "democratic memory", and the rewriting of the past through official bodies that set the historical narrative. There is no perpetual war, but there is an imported cultural agenda that fractures society and diverts attention from economic management.

The "hate footprint" (huella de repruebo) is the latest example. A concept so vague that it allows any criticism of the Government to be labelled as potentially punishable. Its main effect is not to pursue real threats, but to create a chilling effect on dissent. The same goes for social media controls for minors: under the pretext of protection, prior surveillance is established. And as has been seen with other measures, what starts as "only for minors" tends to expand to the whole population.

A modern caudillo model

Against comparisons with Stalin, Hitler or Franco, a sharper analysis emerges: Pedro Sánchez's model would be that of a third-rate Latin American caudillo, adapted to the European framework. The pattern repeats itself: create a real or imaginary crisis, offer yourself as the only saviour, demonise the opposition, control the organs of the State and change the rules on the fly with tailor-made laws and decrees. There are no labour camps, there are waiting lists and subsidies that create dependency. There are no tanks in the streets, there are decrees in the BOE (Spain's official gazette).

The destination: not 1936 or 1964, but eternal 2024

Anyone wondering which year the prime minister wants to take us back to is mistaken. He does not want to recreate 1939, 1975 or even 1984. His project is more modern and effective: a wishy-washy techno-feudalism where a citizenry dependent on subsidies shows its gratitude, an opposition delegitimised by the judicial apparatus, and a cultural agenda that fractures society. It is the Spanish version of managerial globalism, with its captive media landscape, tailor-made laws and a Prosecutor's Office that, according to its critics, performs acrobatics to avoid investigating its boss.

In the end, the image of the ID card at Lidl sums up the process well: it is not an Orwellian Big Brother, but a chain of small steps that, one by one, seem reasonable, but together create a scenario of control unprecedented in a democracy. The goal is not a year in the past, but the perpetuation of the present.