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.

It rarely happens that a novel literally subjugates its readers, I mean that for a few days life starts to revolve around the attention we devote to reading a work of fiction. And that afterwards, once the reading is finished, it starts to revolve around the impact the novel has left on us, the emotions it has made us feel, or the ideas it has summoned, or brought to life, within our thoughts. This has recently happened to me with Before the Darkness Comes, by Fausto Puerto Quetglas, which has just been published by Angle Editorial. It has happened to me, moreover, twice: when I read it in original form, about a year ago, and now that I have reread it as a published book. The author, I will not hide it, is a good friend of mine, but believe me that this is entirely irrelevant: the novel would be magnificent regardless even if Puerto Quetglas and I did not know each other at all, as is possible for many of you, unless you are customers of the Món de Llibres bookstore, in Manacor, which the author has been running for more than twenty years.

Ungovernable? At this point, the unusual situation with two decrees (two packages of measures that aspire to be voted on as decrees) competing with each other, so to speak, to be approved in Congress, is more of a snapshot of Spanish politics: fragmentary, tense, contradictory, difficult to govern. But also plural and diverse. The two decrees, or the two aspiring decrees, are, after all, a portrait in the form of a legislative rarity of what the majority that invested Pedro Sánchez is. A conglomerate of forces that ideologically goes from Junts to Podemos (neither of the two is far-right or far-left, by the way, but they do take pleasure in the role of uncomfortable partners and tough nuts to crack), passing through ERC (which tries to overcome post-process populism with Rufian-style populism), the Basque right and left (much clearer and more solid than the irritated, and irritating, Catalan independence struggle), plus another conglomerate, Sumar, which everyone knows has not worked, but which includes important parties within the Catalan Countries such as Compromís or Més per Mallorca. It is what the Spanish right usually ridicules as the Frankenstein, a majority made of many pieces, supposedly of political corpses (cadaverism related to the civil war is an ingredient very present in the patriotic recipes of PP, Vox and derivatives). Someone can also speak of frontism, of a left-wing front against a right-wing front.

The political and social crisis that has exploded with Maricarmen's eviction, and which reached Congress this Tuesday, has largely made people forget the political and social crisis caused by the massive entry of immigrants through Ceuta on July 30th and 31st. In a way, it is as if one crisis has covered up the other and, trivializing it a bit, as if the one in Ceuta were the summer crisis, while the housing one were the back-to-school crisis. In both cases, public opinion reacts with the same question: what repercussions will these events have on the electoral cycle? More specifically: does Pedro Sánchez still have any option to revalidate the presidency? If it is Feijóo who finally governs, with what pacts with Vox will he do it? In both options, what happens next will not be like 2023: a redefinition of the political landscape will foreseeably occur, in the form of a deep upheaval. These questions are what have a large part of public opinion on alert, much more than the plight of immigrants or the evicted. This, of course, is also part of the dehumanization of the poor, one of the constants of our days.Ceuta has been and remains a very representative example of this dehumanization. The immigrants who have been trapped in the colony (in the autonomous city, in administrative language), those who died in the first days, those who have suffered hunger, thirst, and deprivation, have enjoyed very few considerations. Camps of helpless people have been set on fire, hunts for immigrants have been perpetrated, and open calls have been made to hatred, to murder, to a crusade, and to the defense of Spain by the most violent means possible. The immigrant has been literally put in the crosshairs, and even the children of immigrants have been labeled as invaders who do not deserve any kind of consideration, even by parties and political representatives who call themselves liberals, centrists, moderates, and democrats. The management of the Spanish government has been slow, cumbersome, and hampered by the incomprehensible servitude of the Spanish rulers to the Moroccans; that of the government of Ceuta has been disloyal and toxic. But even more worrying than that has been the opening of the floodgates of hatred to let out the old discourses that deny people their human condition, the kind of discourses that precede massacres or waves of executions.

If we set aside the shouting, the demagoguery, the emotionality, the threats from neofascist groups and parties, and the pre-election maneuvers of all political parties, the essential question remains. And the essential question is that the right of individuals to decent housing is a basic right, also constitutional in the Spanish state. A right, therefore, prior to other rights, such as that of property. Prior or superior, let us call it as you prefer. The right to decent housing is also prior or superior to the law of supply and demand. As the jurist Joaquim Bosch has explained, in many European countries an eviction like Maricarmen's would not have been possible because their laws prioritize the right of individuals to remain in their homes. We are talking about countries like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, recognized communist and Bolivarian fiefdoms. But, as Bosch says, placing market law before the right of individuals to decent housing only leads us to the rule of another kind of law: the law of the jungle, where only the strongest prosper. (In these countries, even if their police forces are as beastly as any others on other occasions, they would have spared themselves a new episode of police brutality, with officers beating the protesters who were demonstrating against the eviction).Every citizen has the right to a decent home; no one has the right to accumulate houses to speculate with them. This applies to vulture funds, but not only to them. Vulture funds shift the logic of the market towards its most illiberal extremes, where capitalism becomes the dark reverse of liberalism, and in this shift move all the actors that operate in the real estate market. Not long ago we were talking about large holders, a way of referring to companies or individuals with a portfolio of homes that they use to exploit them under the logic of maximum profit. Tourist rentals (to which an enormous number of small owners, many of them, also, left-wing voters, immediately subscribed) is another abuse that must be eradicated. Why? Because it only obeys the right to property and the law of supply and demand, while it attacks the right of people to have a decent home. Because it inflates a price bubble that means that people who should be able to afford it (Maricarmen with her pension, for example) cannot pay for an apartment, not even the apartment where they had lived their whole life.

The decadent speech delivered by Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu before the UN General Assembly, which included insults and fallacies against the delegates who left the room in protest, had the sole value of reminding the international community that the genocide in Gaza, and the illegal occupation of the West Bank by Israel's far-right and fundamentalist government, continues its course. The massacre of October 7th and 8th of Israeli citizens by Hamas, an unprecedented attack due to its violence, with about 1,400 civilians killed, was met with an immediate response of a genocide recognized as such by a committee and an independent commission of the United Nations itself, as well as Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and a list of the most relevant international entities and organizations. More than 75,000 Palestinians have died there, of whom more than 20,000 are minors. In this case, it cannot be said that the slaughter has no precedent, because the hostilities of the Israeli army, trained with the idea of treating the Palestinian population as subhumans who must be exterminated while young so they do not grow up to be murderous adults, goes back a long way. Of both things, the Hamas massacre and the beginning of Israel's genocidal response, it will be three years in a few days. In Gaza, more than ninety percent of homes have been destroyed, the arrival of international aid has been obstructed, doctors and journalists have been murdered, and the population has been subjected to a health and food crisis (that is, famine and infectious diseases), among other war crimes. In the West Bank, these days we have seen again the images of Zionist bulldozers razing olive groves, thus destroying the main source of income for many Palestinian families.Netanyahu is the most visible face of a coalition government that includes ministers such as the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who toasted with champagne in the Knesset after approving the establishment of the death penalty for Palestinians considered terrorists, and who asks that every night 30 or 40 people be executed in Gaza, until “clearing” the area of its Palestinian population. Or like the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who boasts that the Gaza Strip is “a real estate gold mine” that the government of Israel is sharing with that of the USA. Since Netanyahu referred to the delegates who left the United Nations hall as “moral cowards,” we must understand that his depraved ministers and he himself consider themselves examples of moral strength. Invoking the right to defense, or much worse, the memory of the Shoah, as a justification for these atrocities does nothing but intensify their baseness.We emphasize that in this article we have referred to the crimes of the government of Israel. Not "of Israel", a confusion that our local Zionism always tries to promote, seasoned with the ineffable touch of indecent victimhood that seeks to equate Catalonia and Israel as peoples joined in misfortune. The decrepit, offensive image of Netanyahu at the UN serves as their mirror.

In the film Umberto D. (directed in 1952 by Vittorio de Sica, a director who dared to portray poverty, and starring Carlo Battisti) there is a very harsh scene. The protagonist of the film is a retired civil servant who cannot survive on the meager pension he has been left with and who finds himself pushed to beg on the street. Because he is ashamed, the man leaves a little dog with his hat, which begs for him. At first glance it is a tender image, but if one stops to think about it even for a moment, it is devastating. It portrays the poverty of so many people who never imagined they would find themselves driven to it and who do not know how to face the situation, because they cannot overcome the astonishment – and the shame, too – of finding themselves in it.The market, left to its own logic without any kind of correction, tirelessly expands the spaces of marginality or makes the poverty threshold higher and higher, so that an increasingly broad sector of the population falls into it. People who in principle should be in a position to afford a dignified life (wage earners or self-employed, or those who retire after contributing throughout a long working life) discover all of a sudden that this is not the case. Their incomes are below prices, and if they do not have an environment that supports them, they soon find themselves driven to poverty.This week, the cases of Maricarmen in Madrid (the 87-year-old woman, in poor health and with low income, who was evicted from her home while protesters were repressed in a new episode of police brutality) and Olga in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (a 54-year-old woman, mother of two daughters –one of them a minor–, who committed suicide because she could not bear to lose her home), have filled newspapers, television news and social networks, and have drawn everyone's attention to the so-called housing crisis, which in reality is nothing more than a result of an economic system based on two things: greed and aporophobia. Put another way: the pathological relationship with money that consists of considering it a superior good (in relation to the rights of citizens, and also in the abstract, as a kind of deity), and the hatred of the poor.People have, or we have, a fear of being poor for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that we know we will come to be hated. Not just belittled, ridiculed, humiliated, violated, or persecuted: but also hated. Above all else, hated. The image of the poor person acts as a reflection of what we never want to be: that is why, when we encounter them on the streets, we turn our heads or quicken our pace. No one will reproach us for it. The poor person is fearsome, dark, and repugnant, because they personify the negation of prosperity. The message for those who cannot pay the prices imposed by uncontrolled speculators is that, in addition to their home and their belongings, they have lost their dignity and the consideration of a human being. The poverty-stranglers have always existed; now, however, they boast of being the leaders of the new capitalism. They have many self-justifying theories, but a single fundamental principle: to hate the poor.

As of now, the application of the amnesty law still has more than 150 cases pending judicial resolution. According to data from Alerta Solidària, there have also been 104 explicit denials of amnesty (certainly not to the police officers who beat citizens in the streets: they were the first to benefit from it). The law came into force in June 2024, more than two years ago. The justice system has been far less diligent in amnestying Catalan independence supporters than in exonerating Ayuso's boyfriend or taking down a State Attorney General. A matter of priorities, we must assume.Finally, it has also been necessary to force the amnesty for the crime of embezzlement (non-existent, given that none of those convicted/persecuted by Marchena and Llarena profited or benefited from the expenses of the referendum). The Spanish courts, by the way, disregarded the crime of embezzlement (which they themselves had put forward as an accusation) in the glorious times when patriotic talk show hosts made jokes about the toponym Schleswig-Holstein and some journalist of their ilk called for bombing German breweries for having “humiliated Spain” by not having handed over Puigdemont at the behest of the flawed requirements of the aforementioned Llarena. These are things worth remembering to keep in mind that the road that has led us here over these nine years has been long and stormy, but not full of knowledge, like the road to Ithaca that Cavafy asked for, but full of sound and fury, of arbitrariness and abuses, of wrong decisions and an etcetera as endless as it is ignominious.On the Catalan side, the space that the pro-independence political parties left open while they were busy killing each other stupidly has been filled with jingoistic charlatans, each one more absurd and toxic than the others, to the point where the emerging “pro-independence” force, destined according to everyone to sweep the next elections, is a fascist party that sides with Vox to insult the memory of President Companys. On the Spanish side, the thirst for revenge has led to the collapse of the thin partitions of the separation of powers, in state institutions populated by ideological heirs of Francoism and far-rightists of new coinage and the latest batch. The State also amnesties itself (above all itself) from the judicial persecution perpetrated against the independence movement, which, on the other hand, and as was to be expected, has been extended to anyone who might be suspected of treason against Spain, even if it concerns the president of the Spanish government. Nine years later, the amnesty satisfies no one, and the darkest versions of patriotism, both Spanish and Catalan, have taken over the landscape. But the most sinister thing of all is that the judiciary has become accustomed to correcting, and exercising, the functions of the executive and the legislative branches.

The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, met a few days ago with his counterpart from New York, Zohran Mamdani, on the occasion of the U20 or Urban 20, a summit of mayors from 34 G-20 cities. From the very moment of the resounding electoral victory that brought him to the mayoralty of New York, Mamdani became a global progressive icon and a kind of anti-Trump counterpower (although that is more for show than anything else), and therefore photos with him are highly prized by European left-wing leaders. Collboni got his photo with Mamdani and something more: the endorsement of the New York mayor for Mayors for Housing, an international alliance of mayors committed to promoting policies against the housing crisis, which Barcelona has already led at a European level and which now seeks to expand internationally.It cannot be said that the U20 was not productive for Collboni nor that he arrived there empty-handed. Barcelona was the only city from the Spanish state to participate and was able to contribute the regulation of rental prices, the total ban on tourist rentals, or the expropriation of vacant homes, measures that have certainly been approved (but are not being applied, or not enough, in one of the preferred cities for vulture funds and large speculators, both banking and non-banking). The Mamdani administration has, for its part, approved the freezing of rent prices for rent-controlled apartments or the creation of public supermarkets to guarantee access for poor families to basic products; Collboni committed to opening the first of these supermarkets by the year 2027 in the Barcelona neighborhood of La Marina.All of this comes to be a kind of alliance of mayors against speculation and it is very good. But it is difficult to maintain the spirit that animates the assumption of these commitments while disregarding the protests this past Sunday against the airport expansion, a great mobilization that also took place in Palma and Ibiza, where it had the dimensions of a historic demonstration. The protests are based on a clear finding: the expansions of El Prat, as well as Son Sant Joan, as well as Es Codolar are being done to increase the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza. And the increase in the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza is directly linked to the lack of control over prices and housing speculation, which is, in fact, one of the direct consequences. The fabulous extractive machine that is Aena may hide behind the need to have infrastructure that is competitive with other large international airports, but this does not take away even a bit of the seriousness of a system failure—the housing crisis—that has also acquired an international dimension and that is especially suffocating in intensely touristified zones like Catalonia (especially Barcelona) or the Balearic Islands (especially Mallorca and Ibiza). Double standards do nothing at all to alleviate this failure.

I open Ara.cat and the first thing I see are two headlines that, juxtaposed, are even more eloquent than when read separately. “Peinado sends Begoña Gómez to trial for embezzlement and influence peddling”, says the one in the report signed by Núria Orriols Guiu. “Mazón shrugs off responsibility and refuses to give new explanations in Congress regarding the DANA”, says the one in the news story signed by Andrea Zamorano.Beyond dealing with the bituminous Spanish politics, both share the common element of duty fulfilled. Judge Peinado, having become an icon of justice placed at the service of political interests that would not escape the understanding of even a child, retires on Sunday and did not want to do so without having carried out the objective he had set for himself (and, we can also understand it this way, to which he had committed himself): to bring the wife of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, to trial for a completely invented case that has had one of the most bizarre and ridiculous journeys in Spanish justice in the last ten years (and that is saying a lot). He has done it just as he wanted: with a popular jury, in order to increase the possibility of a guilty verdict. The family in prison: Begoña Gómez, David Sánchez and, if possible, Pedro Sánchez in person. In his case, for being a traitor to Spain. This is the current wet dream of the Spanish right, a maximum revenge against imaginary grievances. It is the same right that from time to time feels the need to save Spain, even if it means destroying the rule of law or, directly, a few hundred thousand citizens as happened during the Civil War and the dictatorship. And it is, also, the scrupulous realization of Aznar's mandate: whoever can do, let them do. Surely, Peinado will not have a reward because henchmen usually do not get one, beyond a few pats on the back. And the satisfaction of duty fulfilled.Mazón also did his duty, enduring the scandal of the disastrous management of the DANA on October 29, 2024, and the 230 deaths caused by his government's negligence, without resigning, without calling elections, and facilitating an easy transition with his second-in-command, Juanfran Pérez Llorca, so that the management of the thirty billion of the Reconstruction Plan would remain in the hands of the PP and his government. In return, he has been left with an ex-president's salary, a seat in the Valencian Courts where he can go to take a nap if he feels like it, and a full exoneration from the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Country that Mazón flaunted this Monday at his appearance in Congress as if it were a license to kill. And which aborted the investigation by the judge of Catarroja, at least until Mazón loses his parliamentary immunity. The inept and lying man has a reward and protection; the woman who, as far as we know, has done nothing punishable but is married to the wrong political leader, runs the risk of being convicted; the judge who pursues her has the applause of the neo-Francoist horde. The juxtaposition explains well, indeed, the moment of degradation of politics and justice in which we find ourselves.

The episode of the supposed Catalan-to-Spanish interpreter who was unable to translate even a couple of simple sentences in the trial against the four police officers who put out the eye of activist Roger Español, causing the Catalan lawyers to have to self-translate or switch directly to Spanish, is by no means anecdotal. In the case of a political trial like this one (a trial is political when a victim of police violence for political reasons still has to go through the ordeal of being revictimized to claim the recognition that is owed to them), a fact like this must be understood as an added, or at the very least, subsequent aggression that should have been avoided by all means. Instead of this, the aggression occurred with all the harshness and all the absurdity that characterize the eternal contempt of the Spanish justice system for linguistic diversity, that is, for any language other than Spanish. Because this is the other circumstance that makes the scene at the trial against the police officers who mutilated Español impossible to consider an isolated or anecdotal event: the list not only of slights, but also of judicial actions in the form of resolutions and sentences, by the Spanish justice system against the Catalan language is already endless, uncountable, and unacceptable. And it reaches exactly to this very day.

As it could not be otherwise, the illiberal wave sweeping the world has set its sights on the right to vote. Voting with freedom of conscience is surely the most relevant civic act, the most transcendent right that a citizen can exercise. Ballot boxes identify democracies, even though authoritarian regimes falsify them to disguise themselves as democracies: Putin's Russia, for example. But the vote, and specifically the manipulation of the vote for one's own electoral benefit, is the dark object of desire for authoritarian politicians and rulers. They usually accuse others of engaging in it, because when they are in power they indulge in it gluttonously.The temptation to tamper with votes is sharpening. In Argentina, Milei has promoted an electoral reform that, if it goes ahead, will completely redesign the rules of the democratic game from top to bottom. Among other things, the chainsaw man proposes that electoral campaigns not be paid for by the state, but rather sponsored by individuals and companies, and he also wants to eliminate presidential debates and even the mandatory primaries within parties.Trump has turned manipulations regarding the vote into a raison d'être for his policies, starting with the fact of having instigated the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a supposed rebellion against no less supposed fraudulent elections (which he had lost and Biden had won). Trump has likewise fueled the suspicion of fraud regarding the midterm elections in the month of November (and he will intensify it as they approach, because he fears losing them), and a few days ago, at a convention in Dallas, in the middle of an erratic and decadent speech, he wanted to cast a lure: five thousand dollars for every adult American citizen in the event that the Republicans win the elections. A promise like this is indecent, illegal, and obviously unachievable, but the shot has already been fired: it is about putting a price on the vote and treating it as just another commodity.In the Spanish state, the Supreme Court has just provisionally halted the so-called “law of grandchildren” to prevent the voting rights of the descendants of Spanish citizens who had to go into exile during the Franco dictatorship. This is equivalent to taking the right to vote away from more than four hundred thousand Spanish citizens, with the argument –wielded by the high court without any attempt to hide it– that their participation in the elections could “alter the result desired by the Spaniards” in the polls. The “desired result,” in case anyone has lost track, is for the sum of PP and Vox to win the elections. Since we mention it, Santiago Abascal's party has proposed more than once (and broad sectors of the PP view it favorably) to modify the electoral law so that “minorities” cannot run in elections as they have done until now, nor “impose their will” in Congress or the Senate. This, in case anyone has lost track as well, is aimed at the left-wing parties, and also at the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties.

Supreme Court magistrate Pablo Llarena now refuses to amnesty Carles Puigdemont until the Constitutional Court orders him to do so, because he finds that the —devastating— ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union must not have enough consistency for a patriotic judge like him. Clad as Don Tancredo, Llarena digs in his heels and says that the CJEU ruling does not serve as a legal basis to amnesty Puigdemont, given that he considers the Supreme Court's interpretation of embezzlement has not been reviewed. The answer comes by itself: then let them review it. Above all, because the idea of “embezzlement” that was wielded to convict the leaders of the Procés was a new display of judicial inventiveness on a par with the accusation of rebellion, which ended up being dismissed. Embezzlement was not, because they needed charges to add years of prison. But the inconsistency of the accusation was the same.Llarena's reasons for not granting amnesty to Puigdemont also hold no water. Not only that, but they must be very close to prevarication, given his insistence on disobeying not only the amnesty law, but also a ruling from a high European court which, as a judge practicing within an EU member state, he has the obligation to abide by, comply with, and enforce. However, it is understood that Llarena's response is not addressed to legal experts, nor even to citizens with a minimum of critical spirit, but to the media outlets that applaud demonstrations of bullfighting pride. It is as if Llarena were saying that, faced with the hemlock of having to amnesty an enemy of Spain, he will not do so unless at least a Spanish court orders him to (even if it is a court, the Constitutional Court, which the ever-equanimous Esteban González Pons defined two years ago as “the cancer of the rule of law,” despite the use and abuse the Popular Party made of it when it held a majority). Llarena does not care that he has repeatedly made a fool of himself before European justice with his international arrest warrants against Puigdemont. He has seen that it does not work, but his reaction is to maintain the arrest warrant within the territory of the Spanish state: if Puigdemont sets foot there, he will be automatically arrested, a scene that has been the judge's wet dream for nine years. To save Spain, naturally.The fact is serious, but it seems anecdotal because in these years we have seen the Spanish justice system commit so many absurdities, and of such magnitude, that this stubbornness of Llarena seems like little in comparison. It serves as a reminder, in any case, of the fact that the CJEU ruling not only represents an endorsement of the amnesty law (which dismantled the entire rule of law in Spain, according to the right and the extreme right), but also exposed, to the point of scandal, the televised shame that was the Procés trial. And it also reminds us that the judiciary, converted into a political weapon of conservative ultranationalism, remains the most serious problem of the many that Spanish democracy has.

The European Commission has acknowledged that the housing crisis is a European priority and, as a first step to address it, announced last week the proposal for the affordable housing act, the European law on affordable housing, the details of which you can read in the chronicle by Núria Sala Ventura for this newspaper. It is not that there has been a move towards Bolivarianism in Brussels. But they have indeed become aware that the fact that a million Europeans have no home to live in, while 20% of the available housing stock within the European Union is empty, is an urgent situation. The purchase price of a home in community countries has risen, in the last ten years, by more than 60%, and rental prices, by 20%. In addition to being an urgent situation, it is an unsustainable, unjust... and illegal situation: the right to decent housing is a basic social right (in the Spanish state it is a constitutional right) that is often violated, or denied, by market impositions. This European housing law –promoted by former minister Teresa Ribera, now Vice President of the Commission, and by the Commissioner for Housing, Dan Jorgensen– aims precisely at what has been said so many times was not advisable (and according to some, not even possible), and which reality now shows is necessary: to intervene in the market, to set limits and caps to prevent it from falling into speculative inertia.That is why the law proposes measures such as legal limitations on the purchase of second homes or non-habitual residences in those regions classified as stressed areas. Also, imposing penalties on owners who keep apartments or houses empty, to force them onto the market. The new proposed law insists, mind you, on boosting the construction of new housing to ease the market (although it is true that it speaks of promoting operators different from the traditional ones, such as cooperatives or non-profit entities, instead of the usual large construction companies). More interesting in this sense are advances like the ZAN law (zero artificialisation nette), from France, which proposes not to build a single more square meter of rustic land and to work, instead, on the rehabilitation, reuse, and transformation of everything that has already been built.The European proposal aligns well with the ban on tourist apartments by the Barcelona City Council, or with the penalties for having vacant flats in force in Catalonia for four years. In the Balearic Islands, on the other hand, the spokesperson for the PP parliamentary group in the Parliament, Sebastià Sagreras, has declared that “he cannot fathom” that a Majorcan “cannot buy a second residence in another municipality.” Not many things fit inside the spokesperson's head (the PISA report leaves the Balearic Islands at the tail end of the Spanish state, which in turn is at the tail end of Europe in educational matters, and this is also noticeable in the government officials). What won't he say when he finds out that the majority of Majorcans cannot even think about buying a first home in any municipality.

The idea that humans might develop technology capable of destroying us –one by one or en masse, or even as a species– goes back a long way. Already in Antiquity, they imagined artifacts, often sent or forged by the gods, that were capable of doing the job: in the Argonautica, for example, appears Talos, a giant made of bronze who, from the coasts of Crete, threw rocks at invading ships to sink them. Prometheus, for his part, steals fire from Olympus with the intention of supplanting the gods and their ability to create life, an idea that we find recovered in myths such as that of the Golem or Frankenstein.The fear that machines might eventually develop some form of consciousness that leads them to rebel against humans runs through the entire history of literature, but it is evidently from the Industrial Revolution onwards that it gains the most strength. The 19th-century tales of automatons or the aforementioned Frankenstein by Mary Shelley anticipate the great explosion of the science fiction and dystopian genre during the 20th century. The emergence of cinema as an artistic and entertainment form also has a decisive importance in the success of stories about artificial life forms that become a threat to human life. From 2001 to Blade runner or Gattaca, from Metropolis to Terminator or the fusions of human flesh, prosthetics, and genetic manipulations in the cinema of David Cronenberg, the repertoire is endless.A characteristic of human intelligence is that, at the end of the day, the distance between imagination and reality is very short. Sometimes, zero. “If it can be imagined, it can be done” is a motivational, aspirational phrase, but it can also turn around and become a threat. These days, statements from engineers and other people related to large artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI warning that language models could become self-aware and plan – and execute – a mass extermination of humanity have placed us not before a fantasy, but before a possibility that some of these engineers quantify at over ten percent.Until recently, we were convinced that humans were the only self-aware species inhabiting the planet. Later we learned that some animal species also possess self-awareness, and now we are facing the self-awareness of machines. Three years ago, the exhibition AI: artificial intelligence, at the CCCB, showed the history of large language models and brought their pros and cons up for debate. The darkest predictions, as was already the case with the giant Talos, come with military uses. The exhibition spoke, even then (three years in the AI world is a long time), about lethal autonomous weapons, capable of searching for targets on their own and also making decisions autonomously in order to eliminate those targets. Killer robots, to put it simply. The human species does have a unique ability when it comes to building contraptions to massacre itself. In that, indeed, no one equals us.