The Fault Is Ours

The Objective, November 9, 2025

Spain lives immersed in its most familiar contradictions: politics divides more and mobilizes less; indignation is intense but selective; frustration is widespread but harmless. Each week brings a new episode eroding trust in institutions —corruption, pressure on judges, manipulation of information. Despite this decay, many voters continue to vote out of identity or habit, as if the country could improve without us changing ourselves. We demand the impossible and then condemn politics for failing to deliver it, without considering the cost or the sense of our demands.

It is not apathy; it is complicity. Politics merely returns our own image. That is the central thesis of my new book, which shares its title with this column and is published by La Esfera de los Libros (in bookstores from Tuesday and already available for pre-order): politics does not ignore our desires —it fulfills them. Many of our collective ills —from budgetary waste to labor rigidity, the pension crisis, or the housing shortage— do not stem solely from the selfishness or incompetence of a complacent elite, but from how faithfully governments of any stripe translate the core of our preferences.

We are, for instance, the Europeans most in favor of the State controlling the economy and redistributing wealth, yet the most resistant to liberalizing markets or curbing public spending. We want prosperity without competition, equality without merit, and freedom without responsibility. Politicians do not oppose citizens —they follow us. And in doing so, they cater to immediate desires that end up frustrating our deeper aims.

This incoherence explains why, after every attempt at reform, we end up back where we started. We see it in the recurrent and incomplete cleaning up of public finances, but also in concrete measures such as the 1985 rental liberalization, which began to be reversed nine years later, and even more so in the 2023 housing law, which took us decades backward.

The problem is not only political, nor limited to how the system and institutions translate our preferences. We are simultaneously among the Europeans who most distrust their institutions and those who least inform themselves about them. We claim to hate corruption, yet keep voting for the corrupt within “our” party. When we do not disdain politics altogether, we behave more like fans than citizens: we demand reforms, but only if others bear the pain. Hence, every crisis catches us reacting late, partially, and reversibly —as if collective learning also depended on providence.

Changing leaders or parties accomplishes little if we preserve the same incentives and citizen preferences they must satisfy. Representative institutions already reflect what we want quite faithfully; what fails is how those preferences are formed and corrected.

The priority, then, is not just to improve institutions but to cultivate a more lucid citizenry, one capable of recognizing the real cost of what it demands. No reform will last unless it also changes the way we think and vote.

A simple key lies in fiscal transparency. Almost everything public seems designed to conceal costs: income tax is presented as an amount “to be refunded”; social security contributions seem to be paid by employers; prices include VAT so we do not notice it. We also ignore opportunity costs when choosing a hospital, school, or university without realizing how much quality varies among public institutions. If taxes and spending were visible —if VAT hurt a little each time we buy something, if we clearly saw how much Social Security costs on every paycheck, and if we knew what we lose by being unable to choose or by studying the wrong major— our perception of the State and our attitude toward politics would change fundamentally.

Fiscal transparency is not just an accounting tool but a moral one: it makes us responsible for what we demand. It turns civic education into an automatic process, a reflection of daily life. Feeling the cost of the State would be like looking in a mirror. If we knew —and above all, if we felt— how much each service costs, we would tolerate inefficiency, waste, and corruption far less.

That is where hope lies —and the book’s optimistic message: the solution to our problems is within reach. A democracy of informed citizens can correct its mistakes without providential leaders or experts. Prosperity requires neither heroes nor saints, but mechanisms that compel us to think. It is enough for each citizen to sense what they give and what they receive. Then corruption will no longer seem like a distant spectacle but a personal affront. If the fault is ours, so is the solution.

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Based on La culpa es nuestra: Cómo las preferencias ciudadanas frenan las reformas en España, La Esfera de los Libros, Madrid, available for pre-order and in bookstores from November 12, 2025.

English version prepared with ChatGPT-5.0