Spanish politics has been strongly influenced by violence for years. On October 1st, the police brutally beat citizens in the street as they went to vote in a referendum. A couple of years ago, there were grotesque mobs of far-right supporters on Calle Ferraz, in front of the PSOE headquarters, where physical violence was frequent, although the Popular Party applauded them as exemplary forms of citizen violence. Just over a year ago, Aznar famously said, "Whoever can do, let them do."
These are just a few examples we all remember, but we have enough to fill the whole newspaper. Violence isn't just police brutality: there is judicial, institutional, media violence, and even, as we recently learned, tax violence, such as that wielded by Minister Montoro against those who displeased him. This violence is carried out against citizens, or against their representatives, from within the democratic institutions themselves, perverted as instruments of political persecution and repression. Most often, this has been done by the Popular Party or its entourage: they are the heirs of the victors of the Civil War, they know it and like to make it clear. It also enjoyed the connivance of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), which often tried to forget that it was the heir of those who lost the war, and played the role of a systemic party with one hand tied behind its back. Now it is experiencing the consequences, with a right-wing emboldened to the point of prosecuting the Attorney General or organizing rallies where the most repeated chant by the masses is "Pedro Sánchez, son of a bitch." The perpetrators of all this violence are those who now want to make people believe, with the usual overacting, that Sunday's protests in Madrid, which prevented the end of a cycling competition, were an outbreak of violence driven, naturally, by Pedro Sánchez, whom they also hold responsible for the pro-independence coup or for aligning himself with Hamas terrorism.
In the midst of all this, a survey could not be missed.The World which predicts a blue electoral tide (they already announced it two years ago, and lost) and which will further unnerve Junts, which fears having to pay for its support for Sánchez's government with a loss of votes in favor of the racist far-right of the Catalan Alliance. The World has also put on the cover some alleged members of the kale borroka who would have participated in the pro-Palestinian protests on Sunday in Madrid: they call it "tumult", paving the way for the criminalization and judicialization of protests, as they did with the Catalan independence demonstrations. The front page is false and has been denied by police sources. This newspaper is part of a group of media outlets still incomprehensibly considered serious (Unamuno called it.)"dirty Madrid press") who have the sad merit of having paved the way for junk journalism in their beloved Spain. The worst violence that can be exercised by journalism is that of disinformation.
