Choosing the Executioner
I’ve just published a new opinion piece in El Cuaderno Digital titled “Elegir al verdugo: manual extremeño de autodestrucción electoral” (Choosing the Executioner: an Extremaduran Manual of Electoral Self-Destruction).
The article is not about a single party or a single election. It’s about a recurring political gesture: the moment when frustration, abandonment, and long-term neglect curdle into a vote that is not hopeful, strategic, or even particularly ideological — but punitive.
The text looks at rural Extremadura as a case study, though the mechanism it describes is far from local. When public services erode, infrastructure disappears, and political language drifts further away from material reality, voting can become an act of rage rather than expectation. Sometimes it becomes something darker: a deliberate choice to hand power to those who promise not solutions, but impact — noise, damage, revenge.
The metaphor at the center of the piece is deliberately brutal: the voter who does not resist the executioner, but selects them. Not out of ignorance, but out of exhaustion.
You can read the original Spanish version here:
👉 Elegir al verdugo: manual extremeño de autodestrucción electoral
https://elcuadernodigital.com/2025/12/19/elegir-al-verdugo-manual-extremeno-de-autodestruccion-electoral/
Below, I’m sharing an English version of the text, adapted rather than literally translated, to preserve tone and intent.
I’m sure we’ve all entertained the thought at least once, that morbid little riddle that begins to rattle in the mind around the time one acquires enough self-awareness to be bored by it. It’s the sort of question children whisper while adults pretend the world is sensible: How would you prefer to die? Eaten by a sabertoothed tiger or drowned in a vat of Nocilla?
The latter has its charm. One imagines the warm, gluttonous embrace of industrial chocolate, surrendering to its decadent viscosity like a Roman emperor who has finally lost the will to resist dessert. The tiger, though quicker, is harder to romanticize. There’s something distinctly humiliating about becoming both the entrée and the after-dinner regret of a large feline. Not only do you die—you are subsequently crunched, digested, and excreted. A full cycle of indignity.
And yet, it appears the tiger is the preferred method these days.
Across the world, people have grown weary of chocolate-coated promises: prosperity, equality, opportunity…all scheduled, like a perpetually delayed flight, for tomorrow (always tomorrow). Having given up on imaginary sweetness, they now opt for the more brutal but efficient executioner. If everything is going to collapse anyway, why not choose the collapse that at least roars convincingly?
One that actually wants less EU agrarian subsidies? Whose cultural defense of traditions come hardwired with policies that accelerate land concentration? A rejection of green transition funds that, however imperfectly imposed, are the largest investment in rural modernization in a generation? The tiger isn’t abstract; it has a ballot number, a Twitter account and a Facebook page.
I watch, with a mixture of sorrow and anthropological fascination, as Trump supporters in the final stages of terminal illness chew ibuprofen like communion wafers while rejecting any whisper of socialized medicine. Across the street stands their flag-waving neighbor, dutifully laboring full-time at a megacorporation whose wages are so heroic in their insufficiency that he must supplement them with food stamps—food stamps he votes to abolish with something like religious ecstasy. His children’s source of protein has been replaced by a steady drip of televised bloody outrage, yet he cheers as his chosen champions “own the libs” and dismantle the meager benefits that had kept the pantry from becoming an echo chamber. This is the neoliberal paradise.
What we are witnessing is a mass political movement in which people proudly march into the tiger’s mouth and complain only that the teeth aren’t sharp enough. This is not the post–Reichstag Fire delirium of 1933, where the Germans were pulverized by reparations, hyperinflation, and political farce. Anything seemed preferable then. Our situation requires more imagination.
No, our predicament is stranger, more perversely modern. We inhabit societies where productivity continues to rise, like Rosalía’s popularity, while living standards sink with the single-minded determination of a mafia informant wearing concrete shoes. The superrich now devour such grotesquely swollen portions of the economic pie that one suspects they’ve moved beyond eating and begun snorting it. Meanwhile, the young and old alike can scarcely afford rent, let alone Ayuso’s cañas, that spiritual consolation prize of a generation priced out of adulthood.
Presiding over this is the legacy of Tony Blair’s great ideological séance, in which the global left attempted to summon compassion while clasping hands with big business under the table. Workers’ rights weren’t merely forgotten; they were misplaced like a set of house keys discovered decades later in a coat no one fits into.
In his vision, the left, desperate to appear “modern” and “electable,” outsourced its soul and redirected its political imagination toward causes that, while legitimate in themselves—environmental protection, social justice, cultural reform—were deployed as substitutes for rather than complements to economic transformation. Gender equality matters little to a woman who can’t afford childcare; climate action rings hollow to a farmer facing ruin. By treating these as competing rather than compatible priorities, the left performed a neat trick: it could claim moral sophistication while abandoning the economic battles that might actually threaten the capital they now prayed to. Thus emerged a rootless left, perpetually embarrassed by the people it claimed to represent while secretly auditioning for membership in the affluent classes.
No need to look further than the greedy party cannibals like Cerdán and Ábalos, or Gallardo’s insistence on annihilating a once noble party in his race to the bottom of the Serena reservoir.
Nowhere is this absurdity more operatic than here in Extremadura, a region so chronically neglected that mapmakers include it out of politeness. A region preserved in economic amber so absentee landowners can maintain their near-feudal routines. Development here hasn’t been absent; it has been unwelcome. If serfdom had a VIP lounge, it would lie somewhere between Plasencia and Badajoz.
Given this history, one might imagine the left could win here simply by showing up. In a region where owning a second home is as rare as a punctual RENFE, equality a focus on workers’ rights should be as natural as olive oil on bread.
Yet the left insists on losing a contest it should win without even getting out of bed.
Instead of addressing rural wages, land concentration, or the infrastructural void that forces young people to emigrate as if Extremadura were a polite exit ramp from adulthood, the left shows up to the game with Barrio Salamanca catechisms, lectures on lifestyle, cosmopolitan virtue, and the moral failings of precisely the pastimes that make up the identities of rural people and their income. Building platforms against hunting and bullfighting here is like telling a drowning man that what he really needs is a mindfulness workshop.
Their climate plans arrive not as collaboration but as imposition, delivered by urbanites who treat the countryside as a WiFi detox spa. Small time farmers who know the land better than ministers know their inboxes, and their mistresses, are told to radically change practices because a consultancy in Madrid has invented a “new model.”
So what is the chocolate they offer now? A PER crumb tossed from the balcony? A minister’s visit for a photo at the feria? More lectures on cultural sensitivity from leaders who wouldn’t spend a weekend in a village without a five-star parador?
Into this vacuum of neglect and condescension stroll the neo-fascists, not with solutions but with permission: permission to feel seen, to defend livelihoods, to reject a left that seems faintly embarrassed by rural people with rural ways.
The tragedy, and comedy, of Extremadura is that the left brings sermons to people who ask for solutions, symbols to those who asked for decent salaries, and moral instructions and bathroom ethics to those who asked for roads, hospitals, and dignity. No wonder many voters prefer the tiger who promises to roar on their behalf over chocolate-coated elites who flinch at the smell of manure.
And now the coming Extremadura elections promise not democracy but coordinated self-immolation. This won’t be a civil war; no violence is needed when voters voluntarily hand over the keys to fifty years of progress. Why fight when the conquered gift-wrap their own institutions?
But let’s be clear: the fault is not exclusively the right’s. Tigers will be tigers. They hunt because it’s in their nature, and their business plan. Expecting empathy and social awareness from those whose fortunes rely on submission and weakness is like expecting a bull to meditate.
The true authors of this tragedy are the left: vain, greedy and convinced that moral superiority is a substitute for governance. Figures like Gallardo, consumed by self-promotion and an obsession to hold on to his cushy position, no longer even promise Nocilla-death—they march the public directly toward the sabertoothed tiger, assuring them that this time the teeth are symbolic exaggerations.
It didn’t have to be this way. That is the tragedy. But that it will be this way, that a region starved for opportunity will marinate itself in fear, grievance, and nostalgia before offering its neck on a silver platter, that is the farce.
Extremadura, land of the conquistadores is not being conquered; it is setting the table. The tiger is not attacking; it is merely accepting the reservation.
And when the dismembering feast begins, the only real mystery will be whether the voters prefer to be swallowed whole or politely diced for convenience.
