People don’t read the news, think journalists frustrated by the low profitability of what they write. They just read the headlines and that’s how it goes. Not like before, when people bought the newspaper and didn’t put it down until they had swallowed even the shortest ones. It’s a crazy idea, but it’s often quoted. Today, there is no time for anything, except for some politicians. The difference is that they are very selective when it comes to choosing headlines, preferably if they fit their ideas.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso needs less than a starter to get started. In one of those interviews in early September in which politicians announce that they are no longer on vacation, the president of Madrid announced what her information diet consists of. Saturated fats abound.
“Where do you think the government invited 250,000 Mauritanians to Spain?” asked Susanna Griso on Antena 3. This figure should attract attention, since this North African country has 4.7 million inhabitants. The guests would represent no less than 5% of the population.
“According to the headlines of all the media these days,” Ayuso quickly replied. That’s the equivalent of “I read it somewhere.” He didn’t specify which ones, but it was easy to say. It all came from a fake headline in Vozpópuli: “Sánchez proposes regularizing 250,000 illegal immigrants in Mauritania.”
How can the government give papers to 250,000 Mauritanian immigrants when it is estimated that in Spain there are only 10,000 people born in that country? Let’s say that these are people of other nationalities. What would be the benefits for Mauritania?
In fact, during his trip to Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia in August, Pedro Sánchez proposed launching a “circular migration” program through which legal contracts would be signed initially with Africans who would return to their countries after the end of the contract (and they could return the following year). No one gave the figure for the trip. The person who had talked about it in previous months was Minister Elena Saiz, who said that the Spanish economy needed 250,000 migrants a year to maintain the welfare state.
Sánchez’s ultimate intention was to make a generous offer in exchange for the governments of these countries strengthening control of their coasts and preventing the departure of canoes bound for Spain.
For the record, Alberto Núñez Feijóo declared himself in favor of hiring abroad this week, although he maintains that this is not exactly what Sánchez said. No one has yet discovered the difference.
We have been debating for months what measures the government says it is preparing to combat disinformation. This summer, it was confirmed that the far right flooded social media with racist messages after the Mocejón crime to link the murder of an 11-year-old boy to foreigners. Something similar happened this summer in the UK with several days of xenophobic riots encouraged by racists, even going so far as to incite attacks on asylum seeker reception centres.
Even if the perpetrator of a crime were an immigrant, which is not the case, this should not provoke a collective attack against the millions of foreigners living in Spain. No one would think of accusing all Aragonese if one of them killed a minor in Zaragoza. Origin is only considered a key factor if the person committing a crime was born outside Spain.
In that same interview, Díaz Ayuso refined the plan and spread suspicions about certain types of immigrants. He did so with a rather unusual argument. “The problem is that it is a subject that has many nuances and requires many hours, because not everything is black or white. People who come from America, from Latin America, are not migrants. “We pray according to the same religion, we grew up together, we have the same culture,” he said.
It is a fact that Spaniards and Latin Americans speak the same language, but the fact that they share “the same culture” is more than debatable. The expression “we grew up together” is not very clear what it refers to. Its intention, in affirming that Latin Americans are not migrants – it is difficult to deny it if they come from another country – is to point the finger at foreigners who come from Africa or Arab countries. These are the ones who are dangerous.
It is in this context that we must understand another fragment of the part of Ayuso’s interview dedicated to immigration when she talks about the daughter she does not have (politicians have a lot of imagination). “If I have a daughter, I want her to go out with her short skirt, if she wants to, and live as they have always done in their city, and not for there to be a culture shock because we have not known how to integrate them or because we have not done it. We have done it with balance, and it turns out that there are cities that have changed culturally in Spain. And we already know that with Latin Americans there is no culture shock, but rather with others.
What is curious is that Ayuso, who has never been a prodigy of consistency, attacked left-wing feminists for demanding that young women be allowed to go home at night “alone and drunk” without this justifying accusing them of sexual assault.
He did it in the Madrid Assembly in 2020 and repeated it at the PP congress in Madrid two years later: “Their way of seeing life is that of spoiled people who aspire to arrive alone and drunk, devoid of responsibility even in the face of their worst decisions. “This embarrasses most of us, women who work every day to advance our country.” Your alternative might be to wear a short skirt, but without touching a drop of alcohol.
Ultimately, we will have to start asking ourselves whether the problem is not so much the hoaxes spread on social networks that only those already convinced believe, but rather the politicians who use them in their messages.
