Politicians accountability

Taking advantage of the recent cases of corruption in SantaColoma de Gramanet and the former members of Jordi Pujol’s Government , there has been a rise in the already spread discourse against politics and, specially, against  politicians.

There are grounds to be suspicious of the behavior of many politicians but that is completely unfair for the vast majority of politicians. We could discuss the actual percentage of this majority, but I have no doubt that most of the people who, specially at municipality level, altruistically use their free time trying to improve our daily live are people who do not deserve such labellings.

It is very easy to put all the politicians in the same basket, blame them all for everything that’s wrong and feel as if they are not good enough for us. This attitude, however, will only lead to more populist, vague and easy-to-swallow speeches that will make our politics even poorer.

On the other side, I think the right attitude would be to be more critic on our politicians in order to be able to tell the good from the bad, because that’s the only way to increase their average level. Of course this is a little bit trickier than the former option, but among other fundamentals, our democratic system relies upon accountability of politicians, which only works if citizens are willing to play its role as “accountants”. If we give up our duty as citizens and buy the easy, general idea that they are all the same, we are undoubtedly doomed to have worse politicians and worse politics.