From Larra’s celebrated ‘Come back tomorrow’ to the routine ‘wait for the report’, Spanish bureaucracy has changed its form, but not its logic. Today, you do not have to come back tomorrow: you just have to wait online. We have made the waiting more agile, but not the decision. We have digitalised it so that the blockage is faster and more efficient.
The problem is not technical but structural. The administration has not transformed itself: it has armoured itself. Where there were once papers and service counters, today there are screens, passwords, forms and automated silence. The fear of deciding – whether criminal, political or media-driven – has replaced the will to resolve. And bureaucracy, far from disappearing, has become more sophisticated in order to justify inaction.
Spain does not need more digital tools, but more institutional freedom to decide effectively. Because digitalising without purpose is merely a way of disguising paralysis. More technology does not mean more modernity if fear, suspicion and the culture of the case file persist. That is not transformation: it is a simulation of efficiency.
Only if we change the underlying logic – the one that prefers processes to results, formal guarantees to real solutions – will we be able to build a truly useful administration. Otherwise, we will remain trapped in this technological loop that does not resolve, only defers. And in the end, the message will be the same: ‘come back tomorrow’, but with an electronic signature
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