The Banquet of the Shipwrecked: When the Traditional Political Board Starts to Shake

Political privilege, public spending, and social discontent are eroding trust in Uruguay’s traditional blocs and opening space for outsiders.

THE BANQUET OF THE SHIPWRECKED
When the traditional political board starts to shake
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

“How sweet is the martyrdom of paying taxes to finance the creative imagination of our rulers! After all, what are a massive fiscal deficit and a ministerial tour of Europe if not an elegant work of abstract art painted with other people’s money?”
The great comedy of equity, the Roman travel allowances, and the electoral slap
There will never be equity under Uruguay’s current political system.
Government and opposition walk hand in hand in a tender and corporatist pact of silence, competing with identical enthusiasm to see who can squander more gracefully while systematically refusing to measure the socioeconomic consequences of their measures.
They stubbornly place something they pompously define as “social spending” —which is nothing more than the structural gap and the support of their own privileges— above the gigantic deficit that suffocates what every economy minister swears to promote and then tries to justify by assigning responsibility elsewhere: elusive economic growth.
The pinnacle of this farce was masterfully portrayed during Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin’s first year in office, when he accumulated more than US$80,000 in travel allowances (exactly 80,511 dollars), authorizations for airline tickets worth US$168,222, and spent 160 days on official missions.
Among them were 48 days in Italy —including no fewer than seven visits to Rome, his previous place of residence—.
Meanwhile, “cardboard” restrictions were being imposed on the Foreign Ministry’s own domestic spending and, in response to requests for information and public astonishment, the Executive Branch —so sensitive when it comes to pontificating about the most vulnerable— dismissed citizens’ indignation with a caress of indolence: a sublime “these are things that happen.”

The cruelty of asymmetry and the social cost:
While ordinary citizens suffer the erosion of their purchasing power and the suffocating weight of a tax burden designed to sustain the abstractions of the State, public resources evaporate into first-class tickets and European travel allowances.
Every dollar allocated to financing the recurring excursions of this and other ministers is a resource taken away from the genuine investment of the private individual who pays for it.
There is talk of equity, but the basic social pact is being dynamited, conveying the most cynical message possible: austerity is a mandatory virtue exclusively for the poor, while the national budget is loot available to ministerial vanity.

The slap of reality and the electoral preview:
What is fascinating about these absurdities is that the mathematics of discontent does not forgive so much arrogance.
Corporatism believes its impunity is eternal, but social patience has a limit.
That absolute divorce between the hardships of the taxpayer who gets up early to find a way to survive each day and diplomatic tourism inevitably translates into a categorical slap in public opinion polls.
To paraphrase a former President: “They pretend to work, and we cultivate electoral decline.”
The free fall in approval is nothing more than an early electoral preview: the unavoidable bill that citizens are beginning to present to a leadership that treated the productive country as a disposable subject.

The pathetic hypocrisy toward outsiders:
And of course, when the bill finally reaches the counter, the most amusing and pathetic part of all occurs: the same professional politicians who designed this system of privileges begin to complain, with crocodile tears, about the emergence of outsiders.
They are horrified by the improvised candidate who denounces what has become unbearable, and they label anyone who channels public exhaustion an anti-system threat, while carefully avoiding admitting their own authorship.
They seem to ignore that outsiders are nothing more than creatures manufactured by their own arrogance, born from a State turned into a private club.
To gauge the magnitude of the earthquake approaching Uruguay’s political board, one need only look at how the traditional structures of the supposed center-left and center-right antagonism are trembling.
For decades, the two major blocs have taken turns in power under a tacit agreement: change the sheriff, but keep the structure of the fiscal brothel intact.
They take turns promising austerity and growth during campaigns and, as soon as they take office, surrender themselves to a frenzy of spending.
When the crack in trust opens completely, the ground begins to shake beneath the feet of the usual political bosses.
The appearance of disruptive figures is not a meteorological accident; it is the desperate cry of a society that would rather risk leaping into the void with an unknown figure than continue feeding the same diners at the State’s banquet.
As British wit once aptly put it, sometimes we can forgive a man for doing something useless, provided he does not admire it.
The problem is when they do foolish things and, on top of that, expect us to applaud.
The political caste managed to shield its system behind the people’s backs; now they must live through the worst of tragedies: watching as citizens, fed up with so much comedy, decide to sweep them away with the unstoppable force of discontent.

Political privilege and spending
Electoral decline
Rise of outsiders

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