Bueno means good in Spanish and buenísimo means very good.
Then there’s the word buenismo, which could easily be confused with buenísimo even though they have very different meanings.
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According to Spain’s Royal Academy of Language (RAE), buenismo describes an excessively tolerant and benevolent attitude when faced with serious matters.
It’s considered to be a negative quality and therefore is a pejorative term.
Buenismo is the noun and the adjective to describe a person who displays these qualities is buenista.
There isn’t an exact translation into English of either buenismo or buenista but perhaps the closest is do-goodism/do-gooderism and do-gooder, that sense that someone is acting in a way or saying certain things in order to come across as a good person.
Spain’s right-wing politicians are using these words a lot these days to describe what they consider to be the overly liberal or woke attitudes of the country’s left-wing parties and members, especially when it comes to immigration.
Examples of ‘buenismo’ used in the Spanish press.
For example, the PP mayor of the Catalan city of Badalona Xavier Albiol recently labelled Spain’s far-left Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz as buenista vis-à-vis illegal migration, after she accused him of being xenophobic.
Albiol also said Díaz was being a happy flower, which bizarrely is a Spanish colloquial way of saying happy-go-lucky.
And in case you were wondering, Spaniards do use the word ‘woke’ as is in English.
Buenismo and buenista are words that you’ll usually hear in more conservative media outlets or uttered by right-wing politicians, and while they’re not complimentary, they’re not words that can be considered offensive.
Examples:
Según la derecha, el gobierno de Sánchez tiene una actitud demasiado buenista con respecto a la okupación.
According to the right, Sánchez’s government has an excessively liberal attitude with regard to squatting.
Llámame ingenuo, pero prefiero el buenismo a la xenofobia.
Call me naive, but I prefer do-goodism to xenophobia
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