Showing their True Colors

Have mercy! Been waiting for the bus all day on the Camino a Ítaca. Things are going to get partisan ugly this election year here in Spain and a simple bus ride can tell the tale. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish at el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

A lone, conscientious smoker stands downwind from the sundry crowd. With each drag on his cigarette, he checks his watch and nervously looks up the street. Less thoughtful smokers heedlessly fumigate the crowd standing around them, sharing their cancerous, time-killing smoke with bystanders and passersby alike. Under their shuffling feet, the tile is littered with relics of the legions of blithe smokers who stood there before them, waiting.

Impenetrable scribblings of unimaginative graffiti artists are etched into the poles and scrawled on the walls. To the left, a pair of middle-aged mothers commiserate over their grocery trolleys about their futile efforts to minimize the effect of the rising costs of living, while to the right, a young family of immigrants dote on a baby swathed in warm blankets in her carriage. The baby’s older brother sits quietly in his stroller beside her, mesmerized by a series playing on a mobile phone perched on his lap.

Groups of teenagers talking just loud enough to cut through the surrounding traffic, exude vitality and energy, striking a stark contrast to the blank, waiting faces around them. The tepid afternoon sun shines just in the spot where savvy pensioners jostle to catch the last dying rays. Those who have found a seat under the shelter sit like waiting crouching turtles as they stare down at their mobile phones.

It’s a familiar scene that repeats itself at bus stops in cities across the region. But as each rider struggles to find the still obligatory face mask as they get on the bus, they realize that not everyone is going to pay the same price.

That’s because the central government has offered to subsidize 30 percent of bus fares until June. That is provided that the municipalities contribute at least another 20 percent of the cost, thus implying a substantial discount of at least half the price. In Caceres, riders will enjoy a 50% discount while in Merida they have agreed to 100%.

But why aren’t the same benefits being enjoyed in Badajoz and Plasencia?

The answer is simple, if slightly nauseating: partisan politics.

Rather than accept the generous, albeit clearly electoral gesture from the central government, each city governed by the opposition has made the conscious decision to reject a measure that directly benefits those who use public transport to go about their day to day. Rather than offer some relief to those from all sides of the political spectrum struggling to cope with the inflationary crisis, they have declined the offer in a vain attempt to silence the measure and diminish its electoral repercussions in an election year.

Back at the bus stop, I look around and realize that someone is missing from the scene. This portrait of the city, reflected in its bus riders, is fullish but somewhat incomplete. It brings to mind the words of the ex-mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa. Words that would be better suited on the wall than all the meaningless scribble.

“An advanced city is not one in which the poor can move around in a car, but one in which even the rich use public transportation.”

And then I come to a disturbing conclusion. Maybe there’s more to their refusal than just politics?