A critical examination of contemporary presidents and governments in Europe and Latin America during the first quarter of the 21st century
The legacy of the useless doesn’t disappear, it simply blends in.
In this new era they ignore, they are doubly dangerous: useless and contagious.
A marketing lie elevated Mujica to the status of leader and distorted a political brotherhood of refractory individuals who once again managed to regain power in 2026. Politics above reason and morality.
Their natural, posthumous tribute could be none other than to spend money recklessly, using debt to buy an “oligarchic” estate and convert it into a people’s smallholding.
These abuses of public funds, without understanding that the times no longer tolerate such moments of madness, reveal the serious disconnect between demagoguery and the quantum leap that will enslave the digitally illiterate.
The decadence exhibited by the rulers of this first quarter of the century is pervasive; it is visible everywhere.
It is a true modern tragedy that politics has ceased to be a tailor-made art and has become a branch of filibustering farce.
Leaders do not aspire to glory, but to the accumulation of expensive objects to display as if they were elegant, while being mere tacky thieves.
Using luxury handbags to weigh stolen money is not a sin; the sin is not having enough dignity to understand that history will judge them, and their posterity, as plunderers of today and of the future.
There is something unforgivably vulgar in stealing millions to buy objects that only serve to highlight the ugliness of a dirty conscience.
Some presidents, as in the case of Brazil’s Lula da Silva, at least have the foresight to ensure that the International Criminal Court will ultimately rescue them from serving an eternal sentence due to the formality of an improper, but just, judge; and they return to the arena of the sacrifice of corrupting other people’s lives.
The Mirage of the European Clay Magnates
Observe these men closely. We see them atop their monuments, but their foundations are made of broken promises and self-awarded lottery tickets.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez
According to a clever nobleman:
“It happened in Spain that a nobleman named José Luis, more inclined to fantasies of alliances with dictators than to safeguarding his own treasure, believed that the kingdom’s gold grew in bricks like wheat in fields.
Oh, unfortunate fortune! For when the winds of crisis blew with the fury of a giant, the nobleman found only windmills crushing the hopes of his people.
He denies the evidence of his corrupt intentions with such obstinacy that, finding himself with no other option, he had to change his tune, leaving the nation in such deep distress that no balm of Fierabrás could heal the wound of the public treasury.”
” “And what to say of that gentleman of the Sorrowful Countenance—though gallant in bearing and with a deceitful tongue—named Don Pedro, nicknamed ‘The Chameleon of Moncloa’?
He is a nobleman of such strange character that, where yesterday he said ‘I say,’ today he swears ‘Diego’ with the same fervor with which the Knight of the Lions defended his delusions.
He possesses the gift of enchantment, for he has managed to make his promises vanish like the smoke from bonfires, turning necessity into virtue and pacts into a prison for haters.
He walks the tightrope of the kingdom with such boldness that, even with half the people against him and the other half in doubt, he remains in the saddle of his political nag, changing his skin and his partners in vice, depending on which way the wind blows, so that no one knows if what he signs is law or just another adventure of his own invention to avoid leaving the castle.
And his family in prison.”
” Emmanuel Macron
According to Napoleon Bonaparte
“Soldiers of politics! I have observed from my grave the arrogance of this young consul who believes himself Emperor without having won a single Austerlitz.
He has governed with the disdain of one who despises his infantry—the people—dictating reprehensible laws from his ivory tower in the Élysée Palace.
He has forgotten that the heart of a Frenchman is not won with algorithms or pension reforms imposed by the bayonet of a decree.
The ferocity of tractors is more powerful than his fluting bugle-like voice.
His pride has set the streets ablaze; a general who does not listen to the clamor of his vanguard is condemned to his own Saint Helena at the next polls.”
Sir Keir Stramer
Said by Winston Churchill
“Never in the field of financial conflict have so many owed so much to the incompetence of a single ruler. In barely 10 months—a mere blink of an eye in the history of our great island—Stramer achieved what the Luftwaffe could not: to break confidence in the pound sterling.
He offered not blood, sweat, or tears, but a fiscal fantasy that vanished into inflation at the first contact with reality.
It was a capitulation to chaos; a leader who abandoned the bridge before the first wave hit the hull.”
Friedrich Merz
Konrad Adenauer’s Version
“The measure of a statesman is not only the prosperity he leaves behind, but the moral legacy he preserves.
The Chancellor, in his ambition, blurred the line between service to the Republic and service to the foreign interests he inherited from Merkel.
By tying Germany’s fate to the whims of an autocrat and abdicating its defense to those who threaten us, he betrayed the ethics of public service.
A strong Europe cannot be built on the foundation of dependence and personal fear; that is not politics, it is a capitulation of the German spirit.”
These individuals embody an atypical version of the demagogues, which Orson Welles, in a remastered form, recounts in “The War of the Worlds”:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to inform you of an invasion… not from Mars, but from mediocrity.
From the Parisian plains to the palaces of Germany, by way of the Moncloa Palace, unscrupulous minds have seized control of the channels of democracy.
Observe Macron, Sánchez—the Spanish Citizen Kane—and Merz striving to fail, building an empire of mirrors and communication control through absurdity, while Europe crumbled beneath the feet of the employee of the month: Ursula.
They are men who operate in the shadows of post-truth, using fear as their script and the nation as their personal stage.
The world we knew is fading away, and we are the spectators of our own downfall.”
These characters did not seek power to change the world, but to fill the void of their self-perceived importance, falsified with bought applause, and the tickle of a jacuzzi on the twenty-eighth floor of the Ritz, paid for on the backs of a desperate people who vanish into the fog of greed.