Spain's state never resigns: the list of failures keeps growing

Not the floods, not the blackout: the bill for a continuous abandonment

Care homes during the pandemic, the DANA storm that devastated Valencia, the massive blackout, the Ceuta border. The list of badly managed crises keeps piling up, and the official story of recovery is starting to fall apart. Against this backdrop, one argument is gaining ground: the State is not failing by accident, but through the continuous abandonment of the very people it is supposed to serve.

The discontent is not limited to statistics. It extends to the political class and even splashes the Crown: the royal family's holidays are compared with the president's, and "they're all the same" is no longer a cliché but a conclusion.

Some argue this complaint is a mirage. The people themselves, they say, are complicit in their situation: as long as the handout arrives, nobody mobilises over what happens to others. That thesis holds some truth, but it clashes with the evidence that when the water is up to your neck, patience runs out.

The State only resigns in textbooks

The most radical dimension of the protest is a reminder that the modern State, if anything, dissolves, and that its legal monopoly on violence guarantees it the survival that companies and citizens do not have. The appeal to force, which sometimes surfaces in conversation, is the spiral best left unfed: rage has never been a good counsellor when it comes to designing alternatives.

Meanwhile, the list of grievances keeps growing: from climate and gender policies seen as abusive to the management of migration flows in the south. Each event adds a chapter to the same novel: that of the State that is not where it is needed when it is needed.

The final paradox is that all this discontent never quite translates into votes. The same citizen who demands resignations keeps voting for the same parties, or abstaining. As if complaining were the only ritual possible. Perhaps that is why nobody in power feels obliged to resign: they know resignation is a gesture that is not part of the script.