A matter of choice

I think it was about six years ago when I concluded I was not cut out to be a professional politician. From 2006, before the inaugural Catalan regional election, to 2009, before the disastrous European election, I went through an intensive master program of sorts being fully involved in the amateur initial years of Ciudadanos (C’s). 

Over this period of time I held various roles, both locally in Madrid and nationally in Barcelona where I served, among other roles, as member of the Executive Committee. In 2007 I chaired the working group that approved the party’s ideology document in the second general assembly. This document still has full validity today. In 2008 I won the primary election to run as the number two candidate for the Madrid district in the general election. It was short, but never boring.

The experience had its up and downs, and definitely came with lots of lessons learnt. One of the more damning ones is that you can never take people’s motivations for granted. Even at the smallest scale. It is almost a cliché, but I learnt first hand that everything counts in determining outcomes – not just what you might consider reasonable.

At the end of the day it comes to balance. It comes to committing to something where you accept the shapes of the curves in front of you (i.e. short term sacrifices vs. long term returns; daily enjoyment vs. accumulated frustration; degree of control vs. randomness factor, etc.). And I found that party politics did not cut it for me. Entrepreneurship, especially with a social angle, is a lot closer to who I am and how I thrive. Now, this does not mean that renouncing a potential party career equates to turning one’s back to politics. Not at all.

The other day, in a very interesting conference on Spanish institutional architecture organized by our friends at Fundación Hay Derecho, Rodrigo Tena talked about reputation vs. law. I had heard similar thinking before. It assumes you either place your bet on self-regulation (which seems to be where reputation-based governance invariably flows to) or you do it on the rule of law (detailed and often frustrating legal provisions to try to enforce societal values), with an inherent tension between the two.

But is it so? Can we not evolve towards a system where the law impacts reputation more directly, without resorting to fluffy, convenient and too often unsatisfactory self-regulation mechanisms? Can we not, for instance, impose that supervisory institutions completely overhaul how the communicate sanctions to the public?

Without going that far, over these past weeks at Civio we worked a lot to put together this resource, carrying our program recommendations to parties for the upcoming Spanish general election. As a civil society actor with a growing support base we felt it our duty to condense our learning over these last few years advocating for greater transparency and accountability in a series of concrete measures worth advocating for.

Check them out and if you find the initiative worthy I ask you to consider supporting our work. I believe that, borrowing 20th century US Supreme Justice Louis Brandeis’ phrase, the most important political office one can hold is that of the private citizen. And without saying that all votes are the same (I could not disagree more with this statement), I do feel that only if a critical mass of us internalizes the profound meaning of this sentence will we lay a more solid long-term foundation for our political system.

  

Comments

[Pepe Alonso]

Hola Jacobo,

Una pregunta personal a la que, por supuesto, no tienes por qué contestar si consideras inapropiado el hacerlo.

Después de tu paso por Ciudadanos, ¿les ves hoy en día como una opción válida para mejorar el gobierno de España?

O, si la pregunta te parece demasiado directa, ¿qué fuerzas políticas crees que merecen un mínimo voto de confianza el 20D tras escuchas sus propuestas sobre transparencia?

[Jacobo Elosua]

Hola Pepe.

En la elección del voto creo que cada uno tiene que integrar todos los factores que le resultan relevantes y ponderarlos de forma correcta. Estas son las primeras elecciones que recuerdo en las que la oferta electoral es de trazo más fino, cosa que sin duda celebro.

En el capítulo transparencia son varias las formaciones que han formulado programas electorales con buena música, e incluso párrafos de buena letra. Cosa distinta es la credibilidad que los distintos partidos puedan despertar en cuanto a su futura capacidad de ejecución o de priorizar la acción política en este campo frente a otros.

A título estrictamente personal, y sin ser la formación que según mi criterio obtiene mejor nota en propuestas de transparencia, creo que C's sí es una opción válida para intentar mejorar el gobierno de España. No tiene por qué ser necesariamente la única, pero yo así la catalogaría.

¡Espero no equivocarme!

Un saludo.

[Pepe Alonso]

Gracias, Jacobo. Un saludo.