The political turmoil of these months is translating, as it could not be less, into language, an inseparable companion of political action. The decisive battles of public life are being fought today -perhaps always has been and will continue to be so- at the speech of politicians. The goal to which they all aim is none other than persuasion; hopefully not seduction.

Social reality is enormously complex and difficult to understand for non-experts. But it is the people in the street who, on the other hand, decide with their vote, or their abstention, who legislates and who governs. It is not possible to resign from the condition of citizen.

Good orators -an endangered species- have been friends of metaphors as resource to persuade. The mastery of metaphor was, for Aristotle, the mark of genius. The "geniuses" know how to exploit to the maximum the possibilities of talking about a certain reality, usually abstract and complex (politics, for example), in terms of another that is concrete and familiar to the non-expert. This is what we do when we talk about the Internet: we use words such as file, file, trash, portal, virus, upload and download, etc., for somewhat incomprehensible and gaseous realities.

Some metaphors have become so commonplace that they have lost their initial impact: no one is surprised anymore by expressions that speak of "cutbacks", of "belt-tightening", of a party "not getting ahead" in the polls, or that the aging of the population is "skyrocketing". Those who created these metaphors or used them in a timely manner were able to express ideas quickly, vividly and effectively. We need sensory perception. If we compare the phrases "The government resorts to the funds of reservation of the Social Security" and "The government draws on the pension fund", we will see that it is easier to understand, imagine and remember the second one, which manages to materialize in a forceful way the abstract words of the first one. It is not surprising, then, that politicians, in their persuasive strategies, make abundant use of metaphors and other rhetorical devices of similar effect.

It is interesting to observe the contrast between the metaphors, in a broad sense, with which the different parties refer to the same fact. I limit myself to reading the tweets of the last few weeks. Thus, for example, to designate the abstention of the PSOE in the investiture of Mariano Rajoy (PP), Podemos will say that the Socialists "give the government to the PP"; or that Ciudadanos "props up Rajoy". The PSOE, for its part, affirms that the culprit of Rajoy's investiture is Podemos, which "has blown up all the bridges between the Spanish left and has opened the door to the PP", and which "pressed twice the NO button to a progressive government", "bursting the alternative of change", boasting of "political posturing". For the socialists in favor of abstention -a taboo word in these times- the attitude of Pedro Sánchez and his supporters (agreeing with Podemos and independentistas) was a "shortcut or trick" to kick the PP out of the government, "dreams that crash against parliamentary mathematics".

For the PP, abstention is "unblocking", "starting to walk", "respecting the ballot boxes", because, in addition, "just placing the ballot boxes (for a third election) costs 130 million".

As is known, some divergences in Podemos between Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón have come to public attention. For the political party itself, it was simply a matter of "strategic debates": "It is normal for a political force to have strategic debates". For the PSOE, on the other hand, it is a question of a "structuraldiscussion about what the Podemos party wants to be when it grows up".

Abundant metaphors also flourished around the deep internal crisis of the PSOE, which was openly uncovered on October 1st. The president of the Gestora that became position of the party, Javier Fernandez, launched this double metaphor from the field of architecture: "The political building of the PSOE is very damaged, but we keep the site". Other leaders did not fall short, in terms of literary images, who expressed themselves in terms of "sewing", "building bridges", "rebuilding" the party, "recomposing" it, "cohesion, not inflaming", living the "fraternity", "channeling" the discussion, "shuffling" positions, etc. From outside the PSOE, one of the leaders of the PP went so far as to sentence, with a clear exercise of intertextuality that must have escaped the most mature: "When a democratic party burns, something of ours burns" (Feijoo).

They are different ways of framing or framing a certain fact. Ways of framing that imply, as we will have seen, different evaluations of the facts and that point to different solutions to the problems.

As passive consumers, not impassive, of speech political, it is convenient to make, from time to time, a healthy reflexive exercise about what the protagonists of public affairs say and what they want to say. In other words, be careful with metaphors, which are the devil's work.