Félix Bolaños, the PP's hope for not sleeping with Abascal

One of the tics of The reason It's about making the dreams, desires, and strategies of the PP—the party to which the newspaper is subservient—evident by resorting to anonymous sources from other parties, sources that are impossible to verify. Let's look at Tuesday's beautiful piece, whose front page headline reads, "Ministers Conspire Amid Sánchez's Euphoria." The piece doesn't detail any concrete actions; there isn't even a hint of a conspiracy. Only empty phrases like "There are ministers who are making moves" (but doing what?!) or "mistrust and suspicion prevail in the presidential palace while everyone plays their cards" (but what?!) and more or less pseudo-literary images like "the mud is about to enter the 'knives'", "a knife wound", "another slap". Look, we're pacifists at home, but if you fill a chronicle with so much sharp steel, the least we ask is to actually see someone with a cut. A few drops of blood, even.

In the midst of this nothingness, however, this passage stands out: "Everyone has a good word to say about Bolaños. He has been the only minister who has made a pact with the PP this legislature. Within the PSOE, some see him as the element of national consensus that could unite his party and the PP if Sánchez's early election doesn't leave Vox with no other option than to put Santiago Abascal at the helm of the country—something that in Génova (the PP headquarters) they don't even want to consider as a mere hypothesis. Leaving aside the fact that the PP clearly considers it a hypothesis, these lines should be interpreted as an outstretched hand from the PSOE, suggesting that if they sacrifice Sánchez, there would be the option of keeping Vox out of the government. The newspaper disguises this as an anonymous socialist source, but it's clear that it's actually acting as a messenger, a faithful transmitter. These are dreams of a two-party system, nostalgia for the tutelary Transition.