Fernando González Urbaneja | Among the government’s first appointments (ratifications) was that of José Félix Tezanos (77) as president of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS). Of course it is legal; it is the government’s right to choose whomever it pleases for a post in the state organisation chart, as long as it does not incur legal grounds of ineligibility. But what smells of scorched earth are the explanations of the government spokeswoman. Ms Alegría says that he has been ratified in the job because of his success in the polls.
She can adduce many other reasons, including the fact that she enjoys the confidence of the government, but resorting to the prospective accuracy of the election results is a huge lie. As Kiko Llaneras has pointed out in El País, the CIS has failed in the vast majority of electoral forecasts in the past legislature, including in the last legislative elections.
The Tezanos bias in all the electoral polls (and I mean all of them) has been the persistent and stubborn overestimation of the coalition government parties that were not reflected by reality. Polls are nothing more than hypotheses of voter behaviour and therefore do not exactly match reality, even if they approximate it. Well, in this approximation, the CIS, of all the companies dedicated to forecasting, is the one that has erred the most in its hypotheses, despite having the largest budget.
That is why the spokeswoman’s bluff is particularly irritating, because it is unnecessary and because she is a liar. She had enough reasons to explain the re-election of the controversial sociology professor and socialist leader, but she has resorted to the most fallacious one, making good the saying that it never rains but it pours.
Tezanos’ re-election joins that of the attorney general, elected for the same reasons as Tezanos, but in this case he has avoided saying that he is the best of the possible candidates. He is simply the most sympathetic to the government, which explains perfectly the expression of President Sánchez when he said “Who is in charge of the Attorney General’s Office? Well, that’s who.” They are within their rights to choose whoever they want, but not to lie inconsiderately in their explanations.
