"Democracy is so mature in Spain that it is already below Venezuela, Turkey or Syria." Carles Puigdemont tweeted this on January 18, linking to an independent media that had just made news a report published in May 2018 by the V-Dem Institute, an initiative of the University of Gothenburg that classifies political systems based on hundreds of variables.
The message was then viralized on social networks and made its way into related media and gatherings. Spain is not only a consolidated democracy, it has been said, but it is also behind dictatorships that use chemical weapons against their people, such as Bashar al-Assad.
"The truth is that it's a ridiculous thing. It is a statement that no one can believe"complains David Altman, one of the 20 main coordinators of the V-Dem Institute.
Altman is precisely responsible for the part of the report chosen by the pro-independence propaganda to charge against the image of Spain. He explains it himself: "In V-Dem we analyzed 350 variables for each country. One of the things that we have in consideration, like so many others, is the number of plebiscites that are carried out. That's what I'm doing, because I write the chapter on direct democracy.
And that is what Puigdemont has grabbed in a very tricky way. What he has done is like taking a little piece of a Lego, showing it and saying that little tiny little piece is the whole Lego boat. I
t has scandalized me, it has seemed a very ridiculous trap because it is evident that there are horrible dictatorships that many plebiscites do, like Syria; and consolidated democracies that have them banned, such as Germany.
It is taking oneof the indicators between many to attack a country, "he says.
The needle in the haystack
The context is important to understand why pro-independence propaganda has now begun to move a short chapter selected from an old report, a work published in March 2018.
"We know that they have been looking for an international report in which Spain is badly quoted, in response to the Democracy Index of 'The Economist' of 2018, which at the beginning of January considered again Spain a "full democracy" and to rank it among the top 20 in the world, specifically in number 19, with a grade of 8.08, the same as in 2017.
The Economist has weakened the black legend that they are trying to build and this is the reason of the counterattack ", say diplomatic sources. "And since they have not found any report that portrays Spanish democracy as they wanted, they have resorted to this fudge."
Both King Philip V and Foreign Minister, Josep Borrell, have recently used the list of 'The Economist' (as well as the Freedom House) to argue against those who try to portray Spain as a dictatorship abroad . "Spain always comes out well in these reports from the Anglo-Saxon world and that bothers the independence movement because it breaks its discourse that we are in an authoritarian country," says Ignacio Molina, a researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute who also collaborates in the preparation of the reports. V-Dem.
For Andrés Santana, Professor of Political Science at the UAM and another one of the researchers who collaborate with the University of Gothenburg in its global report, one can not even speak of misrepresentation.
"It is coarser than that: it is to put a datum and draw a conclusion that has little to do with that data. It does not make any sense, it's not worth paying much attention to. If at least it were a misrepresentation ... they would have taken a part of reality and instrumentalized it, but it is not even that. "
Spain remains in the group of the largest democracies in the world
It is considered a 'full democracy' and surpasses other countries such as the United States, France or Italy
The Secretary of State of Global Spain has been disseminating in recent months the Democracy Index of 'The Economist' and has launched an active campaign to defend the image of Spain abroad. In this regard, however, they prefer to avoid controversy. "Although this index leaves Spain better than the pro-independence environment suggested, it was published in May of last year and we understand that it is not appropriate to assess it now because Mr. Puigdemont has decided to tweet it. We are not going to make echo of hoaxes or crude manipulations, "they say.
From the organism directed by Irene Lozano they do show "some concern" about the "fake news" that proliferate, especially in social networks, "to discredit Spain and its reputation." "We are very attentive, of course, to confront them with facts and realities: Spain is a consolidated democracy and recognized as such throughout the world, no matter how many people insist on the opposite, the luck we have is that these lies barely have an echo beyond the most radicalized parish, "they say.
It is a very rude manipulation because it occurred to him to set aside a marginal and relative section on the use of plebiscites
Molina insists that the Swedish V-Dem project is a "very ambitious and very complex, with a lot of work behind" initiative, but that it has been under way for a short time and introduces new variables that do not take into account other studies. "It is still in the pilot phase," he insists, "and Spain is going out here worse than in Freedom House or 'The Economist', but for reasons that have nothing to do with the Catalan crisis." In the global index, Spain fell several positions compared to the previous edition of the same study, specifically from 22nd to 35th place. "But I insist that it has nothing to do with the situation in Catalonia, in fact we went very well in the evaluation of the judicial system, and in local self-government Spain is the tenth in the world ".
"The manipulation of Puigdemont", concludes Molina, "is very rude because it occurred to him to separate a marginal section and relative to the use of plebiscites and referendums, where we are below Turkey, Venezuela or Syria, but above France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Canada, Germany or the USA ".
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/cataluna/2019-01-23/cataluna-suecia-siria_1775770/
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