Likud, led by Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu, was the most voted party in Tuesday's Israeli elections, but it nevertheless received a significant electoral punishment and was left very far from being able to form a government, even by adding the ultra-Orthodox, Zionist, and far-right partners that have supported it in recent years. Together, they would total fifty seats, when the majority in the Knesset is sixty-one (in the previous legislature, Netanyahu and his partners had sixty-three). There is a consensus among analysts that Netanyahu has paid at the polls for the radicalism of his last term, which many attribute precisely to the extreme positions of his partners. Two ministers, in particular, the fanatical head of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, and the cynical head of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, from the Religious Zionist Party, also far-right and ultra-nationalist, have personified anti-Palestinian radicalism and are the direct reason for the strong mobilization shown in these elections by Arab Israeli voters, who have gone to the polls in mass. If an electoral repeat is not forced, the Arab parties will be key in the formation of a new executive led by Gadi Eisenkot and his party Yashar (which defines itself as center-right, although this is a quite elastic label) and which could include secular right-wing forces such as Israel Beitenu, or center-left ones like The Democrats. Whatever happens, however, Netanyahu may lose the immunity that has given him impunity, and have to account for pending corruption charges before the Israeli justice system. Or be tried by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, for the genocide in Gaza.

As the death toll rose mercilessly, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, and the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, came out to make statements. Puente made an effort to provide technical explanations, and he did so, but he introduced a cursed word, an inadmissible word in moments of desperation, and also in a savage election campaign, or pre-campaign: it is the word “inexplicable”. That the minister recognizes that the catastrophe occurred due to an “inexplicable” error (that from the control center the order was given to resume travel to a train on a stopped line, in a high-speed system that prides itself on being one of the most advanced in the world) is unacceptable because it is insufficient. Pedro Sánchez, for his part, gave a more political explanation, in which he hinted that heads will roll and that whoever has committed an error or negligence will pay dearly. At the same time, he also verbalized a cursed, and also unacceptable, piece of evidence both for the victims and for a context of all-or-nothing political confrontation: two extremely serious accidents on the high-speed line –two railway catastrophes– in the same year. In fact, with only seven months of difference. This is also not acceptable.

The leader of the fascist party Aliança Catalana, Sílvia Orriols, encouraged her voters a few days ago, in an interview on Ràdio 4, to vote for Vox in the Spanish elections. When asked if she saw any contradictions between voting for Vox in the Spanish elections and Aliança Catalana in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, she replied: “I don't think so. They [the voters], in the context of the Spanish elections, put their trust in whoever they consider appropriate, and in the context of the Principality of Catalonia, they put their trust in us because they consider that our project, which involves the restoration of the Catalan state, is the most appropriate or suitable for reaching the welfare state they yearn for”. The same day, in an interview with La Vanguardia, Santiago Abascal stated that his party is willing to “collaborate with Aliança Catalana to defend the Catalan identity” against the caliphate (he calls it “the Muslim threat”). The courtship is in sight, the declaration of principles is clear on both sides.

The mobilizations taking place around the world (from Bangladesh to Barcelona, passing through Milan, Paris, and Madrid) can evidently have elements in common, starting with the fact that they are mobilizations on the streets of these cities that arise simultaneously, led by young people. But there are also differences that advise against viewing them as parts of the same whole. Here there is everything: protests, revolts, and demonstrations with more or less clear motivations, objectives, and slogans. And then there are also riots, blind acts of vandalism, and hollow actions that at most create social alarm and chaos, not to mention the destruction and looting. They seek to blend in with the other movements, and in fact, this confusion is their main objective.

There is consternation among readers and writers in the Catalan language over the death, a few days ago, of Jaume Pont, one of the most prominent poets of his generation. Pont was born in 1947, like Josep Piera, another of the great poets in the Catalan language of the last decades: because of these two deaths, it is appropriate to think of 2026 as a disastrous year. A beautiful photo circulates on social media in which both appear, Piera and Pont, at the former's house in La Drova, about to embrace, happy to enjoy the pleasure of true friendship. They were masters in the art of writing verses and in the art of living, and they made this clear, without even setting out to do so, in everything they did. Their condition as “peripheral” (Jaume Pont was from Lleida and Josep Piera from Beniopa, in the very fertile region of La Safor) was not just a fact about their respective places of birth: poetry, high poetry, is always a peripheral matter, and this does not mean that it does not interest anyone (quite the contrary: it interests a multitude, it interests the crowds) but rather that it is not monetized, it is not venal, it is not exchanged in euros or dollars, and, for that reason, those who need to quantify everything and put a price on everything find it suspicious.

Some cynic might come to believe that the magistrates of the Constitutional Court were left exhausted after clashing with those of the Supreme Court over the amnesty law, and no longer had the strength to contradict them in a new outrage, as or more democratically serious than the previous one. It concerns the precautionary measures imposed by the Supreme Court against the eighth additional provision of the democratic memory law, which in practice leaves the 163,020 people naturalized by virtue of this measure without the right to vote. The Constitutional Court (by a large majority, but with two dissenting opinions) has dismissed—as “premature”—the claim of the Ombudsman, who had filed an appeal to set aside the Supreme Court's decision, given that the period for allegations that the Supreme Court left open for this case is still ongoing. Some cynic, as we were saying, might come to believe that the Constitutional Court magistrates preferred to hide behind a technicality rather than aggravate the clash they are already maintaining with those of the Supreme Court (a clash that is also a terrible symptom, in this case of the politicization of justice and its reverse, which is the judicialization of politics).

A significant group of scientists –in both quantity and quality–, accompanied by a series of names from civil society, has signed an open letter to the governments of the two Generalitats (those of Catalonia and Valencia) alerting them to the need to take measures in the face of the threat from the meteorological phenomenon known as El Niño. This letter is part of the international campaign Alert El Niño, and whoever takes the trouble to read it will realize that there is little room for personal opinions, and even less for table or bar-side discussions. Clearly and concisely, the letter sets out what El Niño is, what its causes are, why this time it is more dangerous than on any other occasion, and what its consequences could be. It is not about creating alarmism, but about becoming aware of the reality of our natural environment, which of course has and will always have primacy over any other consideration. We are in the middle of the Mediterranean, one of the areas of the planet where climate change has a stronger and faster impact. In addition to awareness, the letter urges those in government to take the measures that are within their power to take: some are for immediate application, others are for the medium term, but all are necessary. The authority and prestige of the scientists who have signed the letter (such as CSIC researcher Jordi Solé or Physics doctor Olga Alcaraz) make it a document that must be taken very seriously.

This man who is running for the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Catalonia to explain something he calls Contrato con España and which amounts to the most notable measures he intends to implement if Spain hires him as president of the government. They are a series of dreadfully stale right-wing things, which include the defense of national sovereignty (banal nationalism and not so banal in abundance), the “lightening” of the state (cuts in the labor, social, and cultural spheres), “organizing” immigration (open bar for xenophobia and aporophobia), the “guarantee” of pensions (they want to privatize them), the “strengthening” of public healthcare (they want to cut it even more), and a stellar, dazzling measure, without which the “good people,” who are the ones Feijóo addresses, cannot live: guaranteeing the teaching of Spanish in Catalonia, and it is understood that also in the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, where there are also natives who insist on speaking (and teaching in school!) the Catalan language. In the clause of the “contract” referring to education, there is also a commitment that candidate Feijóo assumes and that I cannot refrain from reproducing, because it constitutes a singular and enormous absurdity: “[...] education must reward effort, increase requirements, and reinforce the authority of the teacher. The contents will be developed by the royal academies”. The royal academies do not perform nor have they ever performed any type of educational or pedagogical task, and the works they produce have nothing to do with primary or secondary school. Now all that is missing is for the students to have to complete their training with a year on the Juan Sebastián Elcano.

In a relatively short time, we have had to come to terms with the fact that climate change has ceased to be a warning or an alarm and has begun (it seems, only begun) to turn not only into a perceptible reality, but directly into a real threat. Some experts say that the Mediterranean climate is undergoing a process of tropicalization, and that for this reason, downpours, floods, and new phenomena—or ones hitherto unusual or unknown, for which new names must be invented, such as the medicane or Mediterranean hurricane (sometimes these new names will need to be refined a bit)—are becoming increasingly frequent: attempts to name a phenomenon that closely resembles a hurricane, in a place in the world where there had never been any hurricanes before. It is just one example, there are—there will be—plenty more.

In an interview with El Periódico and published this Sunday, the PP candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said that “government with Vox can work, it already does so in four autonomous communities”. It was not so long ago that PP leaders, and especially Feijóo, avoided being photographed with those from Vox at demonstrations, so as not to be associated with the far right. Those were the times when Vox called the PP “derechita cobarde”, while they were eating into their ground and electorate.

The political forces “to the left of the PSOE” had until this Friday to unify efforts and present some kind of joint proposal that could inspire, or at least mobilize, their electorate. We are referring to the parties of the so-called Broad Front (Sumar, Comuns, Més Madrid, IU) and the two parties of the Rufianista-Monterista Front, or ERC-Podem. This, however, has not happened. The fronts that have prevailed, for the umpteenth time, are the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, so inspirationally described in Life of Brian by Monty Python, and their customary, irritating, stupid inability to reach any kind of agreement among themselves. Unless there is, in stoppage time, one of those tiresome plot twists, one of those childish attention-grabbing stunts that the politicians of our time have subscribed to, the “unity of the left” will not happen again, precisely because of those who have spent months and years lecturing and gesturing about the need for the unity of the left. The fact that the calling of elections surprised all these forces with their homework undone and completely disorganized was already shameful enough; that in the following weeks they have not only been unable to correct this situation but have ended up ruining it, is a calamity. In any way they could, the voters were asking for only one thing: a single ballot, a single list to vote for. For this, one did not even need “unity of the left”, just a certain willingness to reach an understanding. A little bit of skill, intelligence, flexibility, a steady hand (left, yes) and, above all, an important dose of humility, self-criticism and a will to serve the citizenry. There has been nothing of all that. Neither “a single ballot” nor anything else. Nothing at all.

The now famous "whoever can do it, should do it" of Aznar has reached, as it could not be otherwise, the Spanish monarchy, and that is where they stand. Announced weeks in advance, the visit of the King and Queen of Spain, Felipe and Letizia, to the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, has no other content than the full support of the royal house for the potential PP and Vox government. At least that is how the Spanish right and far-right interpret it, because it is quite difficult to interpret the gesture in any other way, and even more so in these days of full electoral pre-campaign. “We are living in dark days,” the monarch stated last February, in a speech before the European Parliament, with his characteristic ambiguity: everyone could understand that the darkness he spoke of alluded to the rise of the far-right throughout Europe, or perhaps to the evils of Sanchismo. In any case, Felipe VI and the Spanish Crown do not hide their preferences, at least since October 3, 2017.

It has become a routine operation for civic entities—or directly parties—of the far-right or Spanish ultra-nationalists to take their political demands to the highest judicial instances, and for judges and prosecutors to take on the task of turning them into sentences or resolutions of mandatory compliance for citizens or institutions. This is what is known as the judicialization of politics, a mechanism that was greased and fine-tuned (“fine-tuned” was a key word) during the years of persecution and criminalization of the Catalan independence movement, and which has now reached cruising speed against all enemies of Spain that stand in its way, starting if necessary—as we have also been seeing for some years now—with the government of Spain itself.

Rufián has ended up becoming a kind of half-candidate between ERC and Podemos, an idea that until not long ago might have seemed outlandish and that now passes as a kind of compromise solution. Between now and Friday, it remains to be seen whether his maneuver succeeds in leading the rest of the parties "to the left of the PSOE" that are looking to constitute the so-called Broad Front –Moviment Sumar, Comuns, Més Madrid, and Esquerra Unida– to present a single ballot in the elections, as many of their voters and some of the parties that want to join but without diluting their acronyms (as happened in 2023 with the creation of Sumar) are asking for. This is the case of Compromís, in the Valencian Country, and of Més per Mallorca and Més per Menorca, in the Balearic Islands. A single ballot would be the clearest electoral message that the left could send to its voters, and for Gabriel Rufián it would mean the validation of his thesis on the need to unite everyone who has the concern of stopping the extreme right in Spain. A frontist message and thesis, unprecedented in a candidacy for the general elections of a Catalan pro-independence party. The other thing that obviously remains to be seen is how this new configuration affects the electoral results that ERC may obtain in Catalonia. As a counterpart in the negotiations between the two parties, Podemos has renounced running in Catalonia for the benefit of ERC, but it is unlikely that the rest of the Broad Front parties with electoral aspirations in Catalonia will want to do the same.

The news that the poet Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel has a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy: just as some recent Nobels (like fellow poet Louise Glück, like Annie Ernaux, like Han Kang, or like the one from just the previous edition, László Krasznahorkai) constituted slight and pleasant surprises, Anne Carson's shines for its forcefulness. “Ah, right, Anne Carson,” the many thousands of readers of her verses around the world must have said. When I say that the aforementioned were “slight and pleasant surprises,” I mean that they were not entirely unexpected: they appeared in the Nobel “betting pools,” in the lists of authors nominated to receive the award, but perhaps in less visible spots on those lists. Not Anne Carson: Anne Carson had already been among the names heading them for years, and it is not out of place to imagine her, in recent years, waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy. A bit like Paul Valéry, who was among the candidates for twelve or thirteen years in a row, and every year, when the Nobel dates arrived, he would go for long walks to calm his nerves. He died without receiving it, precisely the year that the Swedish academics had decided –they said– to give it to him. Anne Carson has declared that she too will go out for a walk in the woods, but in her case “so as not to have to answer the phone; afterwards, we will enjoy the silence.”

I had this title written for the article when I saw that the Irish actor Liam Cunningham dedicated the same epitaph to Maricarmen Abascal in a tweet, only he was more specific: “Murdered by greed”, he wrote, murdered by greed. Yes, “murdered” is more accurate. Maricarmen's case has gone around the world and the icon has become global, because the housing crisis is spreading throughout Europe, in the form of collapse and emergency. For that reason, and because reacting to infamy is fortunately a human behavior, except for those individuals who already live anesthetized by cynicism. Or by greed itself. Maricarmen could not withstand the ordeal of being evicted from her home by a squad of police who knocked the door of her apartment down, as if they were going to confront a dangerous criminal. Whoever does not understand that this woman died because of this is not in a position to understand anything.

The total amnesty for the leaders and those prosecuted in the 'Procés' is excellent news that puts an end, not certainly to the political conflict between Catalonia and Spain, but to one of the darkest episodes in the current Spanish democratic era. The amnesty is for those who have suffered judicial, police, political, and media persecution for nine years, but it is above all an amnesty that the Spanish state grants to itself, after its powers have incurred the crime of crimes against democracy by persecuting citizens for ideological reasons. Beating citizens on public roads, imprisoning civic and political leaders, or forcing them into exile, criminalizing ideas, is incompatible with democracy and, nevertheless, it is exactly what happened in the Spanish state in 2017 and thereafter. If there was a coup d'état in Spain, it was, as has been said and repeated, the one that began in 2010 with the Constitutional Court's ruling against the Statute and extended until this past Monday, when finally the stage of political repression against the Catalan independence movement could be considered closed. A coup d'état carried out from the State and by servants of the State, at all levels of power: from the police to the monarchy, passing through the judges and prosecutors (Llarenas, Marchenas, Lamelas, Zaragozas, Madrigals) who have taken an active part in a long and unfortunate history of lawfare or dirty judicial war, naturally passing also through all the political leaders who in some way have promoted or given cover to the absurdity. The Spanish state has gambled its democratic credibility, already in itself quite inconsistent, and reached the point of descending to the category of flawed democracy (instead of the one for full democracy, where it is usually found) in the year 2021 in the Democracy Index of The Economist. That those responsible for all this now emerge with complete impunity is nothing short of unjust, and gives an effectively melancholy varnish to the moment the amnesty is applied.

Once again we have to agree with José María Aznar, analyst: the general elections of November 29 are not just any elections. According to Aznar they are "the most important in the last fifty years": more "important", we must understand, therefore, than the constituent general elections of June 1977, where the Cortes that drafted and approved the 1978 Constitution were chosen, the same one against which Aznar wrote some deeply furious and "liberal" articles in the newspaper La Nueva Rioja. Now, having long since become a Visigothic Pelagius of the self-styled constitutionalism, the former president of the Iraq war and the "España va bien" warns us of the hecatomb: "If the current government majority continues in power, the constitutional system and the parliamentary monarchy will end", he has warned. It must be recognized that, depending on how you look at it, it is a tempting scenario.

Pedro Sánchez appeared as a laboratory politician built in the workshops of Ferraz and propelled to the political front line to make a pact with Citizens. This initial plan failed several times until Sánchez found himself presiding over a government "with Podemos ministers," a situation he had said he did not want because "it would not let him sleep." In the same way, he has gone from being against the amnesty for Catalan independence supporters to being its main champion, etc. The newspaper archives of the contradictions of what Sánchez had said are abundant.

Human nature is reactive: it shrinks before the announcement of danger, and puffs out its chest, blusters, and becomes careless when the danger has passed without causing great havoc. This weekend it was curious to see, on social media, that those who showed the most apprehension in the face of the warnings about the climatic anomaly arriving in Catalonia – mini-hurricane, medicane, or Mediterranean hurricane: all the names are rather ugly – later mocked the alarm once the worst had passed, or so it seemed.