I understand everything but comprehend nothing. In the world of permanent exhibition, religious experience these days becomes a kind of mass spectacle televised by the minute. Spiritual experience is sublimated in stadiums and grand performances, massive avenues and a lot of paraphernalia. Peter's representative arrives in Madrid and will pass through Barcelona and the Canary Islands with an excess of solemnity.

Government changes in Spain go through processes of demolition. They seem like regime changes, and sometimes they even are. I'm not talking about the virulence of political confrontation. Internal struggles within and outside parties do not make Spain unique. No, what makes Spain unique is an unfinished territorial architecture that always threatens to be demolished or reconfigured. It is this unresolved issue and the bloody expression of ideological difference that turns politics into a battlefield.

This article is a tribute and expression of gratitude to our readers. A very diverse and qualified jury, convened by the Generalitat, has awarded the National Communication Award in the press category to the director of ARA. But this is an award for all of us who make the newspaper AND especially for our readers, who are our reason for being. Free citizens, interested in the world around them, involved in their society and their time, and who consider it worthwhile to support a media outlet in stormy times and pay for the information we publish. 

After decades dedicated to politics, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and then President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, delivered the best sentence of his life: "We all know what needs to be done, what we don't know is how to get re-elected once we have done it" (2007). The difference between knowing and doing, or between diagnosis and solution. And here we are, in the permanent struggle between what knowledge tells us, what the quality of public debate is capable of agreeing upon, and what is politically executed. We are talking about democratic politics, of course, which has many more limitations than autocratic regimes, which in the same way that they approve a five-year plan, make a minister disappear or make a dissident fly out of a window.

The Teaching strike is not a labor protest but a diagnosis of the country. The unease of teachers and families points precisely here. It does not speak solely of salaries, schedules, or bureaucracy. It speaks of a deeper fatigue: the school has been caught between growing demands and a progressive erosion of authority, prestige, and the teaching function, and many families are also not satisfied. 

Opinion polls are the political translation of public opinion's mood at a given moment, and the snapshot that emerges from the poll we published these days in ARA is that of a restless society. It could be described as frustrated. The fact is that the symptoms it presents are those of a fearful society that reacts by turning to the most irate. Polls mark social trends, and in the YouGov poll, we see a government with a president who doesn't excite, but maintains, albeit slightly down, the expectations for the PSC, a Republican Left that would have hit rock bottom and would be on the rise, and a far-right that is soaring. Catalan Alliance places third in voting intention, Vox continues to advance, and both threaten Junts. The Junts supporters are immersed in a serious project crisis and would lose votes on the right and left.Clearly, the moment in which the fieldwork was done can always influence the responses, and in this case, it coincided with the presentation of Gabriel Rufián's personal project, which has leveraged social media communication and effective populism, whether in the Congress tribune or in videos with activist Vito Quiles. The result is that it boosts ERC and keeps it in second place.

The ideas that end up transforming a society rarely present themselves as ruptures. They don't arrive with a bang or with an explicit will to break. They arrive disguised as normality, with the deceptive calm of common sense. "National priority" is one of those ideas. It seems harmless – taking care of "our own people" first – but it contains a profound mutation: turning rights into a matter of order, of blood, not of equality.

There are times when a society stops discussing policies to start discussing meanings. Words become weapons; symbols, battlefields. It is not a new metaphor, but it is a persistent one: the idea of cultural war as the central axis of public life. The term, popularized by James Davison Hunter, described a struggle between incompatible moral visions. Three decades later, the struggle not only continues but has accelerated, amplified by technology, exploited by a way of doing politics, and normalized as a permanent state of opinion.

The more Donald Trump sinks into the Iranian mire, the more we Europeans must regain the pride of being part of such an imperfect and self-conscious club. 

Teresa Ribera (Madrid, 1969) is the Vice-President of the European Commission for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition since 2024, in a legislature that has veered to the right and must constantly battle to preserve unity against the unpredictable attacks of the United States. The most recent, a war in Iran that has shattered peace in the Middle East and distorted the global economy. The former socialist minister is now working on what the European response to this latest crisis should be, and defends democratic values that she believes must be asserted in the face of Donald Trump's aggressions.

They say Nabokov used to tell his students the following: "Do not inflate ignorance with eloquence." As is evident, Trump would not have attended class. Never before had a US president caused so much bewilderment in the markets, among allies, enemies, and his own electorate. His contradictory statements cause erratic movements in the stock markets and are wearing down the patience of traditional allies, whom he insults in a frivolous and puerile manner. Added to the insults directed at allies who do not allow themselves to be dragged into a war for which no one consulted them, are the threats of a neighborhood thug, such as sending Persian civilization back to the Stone Age, exactly where the president of the great superpower seems to mentally come from. He has also not shied away from threatening to leave NATO, even though the decision theoretically depends on the US Congress.

There are unjust wars, wrong wars, and avoidable wars. But there is a worse one: war without purpose. This is where we find ourselves.

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The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, presented a budget proposal to force negotiations with ERC, but the gamble backfired. The first lesson of this political crisis, which has led him to withdraw the budget proposal, is that the government cannot act as if it has a majority it does not. The investiture agreement brought Illa to the presidency of the Generalitat, but he needs to negotiate and uphold agreements to continue making progress in the legislature.

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We can't expect Trump to have read the classics, but we could at least hope he hadn't purged the entire American intelligence service. "War is a chain of accidental events that no man can control," Tolstoy wrote in War and PeaceIn his fresco on the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy insisted that conflicts rarely follow the plans of generals or rulers. Armies move according to strategies and doctrines, but history often advances through unexpected deviations: miscalculations, rash actions, accidents, or strokes of luck. War is, to a large extent, the realm of the unpredictable. This is why wars are so difficult to control once they have begun. Every move has new consequences, every response provokes a possible escalation, and every gesture can trigger unforeseen events. Wars spread geographically, politically, economically. And here we are. The power of uncertainty is especially visible today in the Middle East. Since the attack of October 7, 2023, the region has been undergoing one of its most profound reconfigurations, and in this scenario, the US and Israeli attack on Iran is central and has unpredictable consequences.

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Jordi Hereu (Barcelona, ​​1965) has been the Minister of Industry and Tourism since 2023, in a legislature marked by an unstable and volatile geopolitics that affects the day-to-day operations of factories and the tourism sector. Now, the focus is on the war in the Middle East following the US and Israeli attack on Iran, which has caused an immediate increase in oil and gas prices. He is also a former mayor of Barcelona who keeps the city and Catalonia very much in mind, especially during recent crises such as the commuter rail and freight crises, recalling his first job at the Port of Barcelona when the Logistics Activity Zone (ZAL) was just getting started.

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"Trump's best foreign policy? Not starting wars. JD Vance The Wall Street Journal (March 2, 2023)

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If we were to adapt Tolstoy's idea to monarchy, we could formulate it thus: all stable monarchies are similar; each monarchy in crisis is so in its own way.

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As the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell (Pobla de Segur, 1947) experienced firsthand one of the most serious moments in recent European history: the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, four years into the war and with the European Union, threatened on several fronts, facing an existential challenge, Borrell speaks to ARA in his office at CIDOB, the organization he chairs.

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The Enlightenment is not an outdated and obsolete chapter in the history of ideas, but rather the normative core of liberal democracy. It is, above all, the political commitment to replacing submission to tradition, dogma, and the whims of power with autonomy, and to replacing authoritarianism with critical thinking. Kant summarized it when he said that the Enlightenment is "humankind's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity." And with the advance of reactionary darkness, we must remember that light is preferable to darkness and that the defense of democracy continues.

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George Steiner warned that civilization is a very thin layer: beneath the skin of culture, there is always the harshness of the elements. The European welfare state was, in essence, a response to this fragility, a system designed to reduce individual exposure to economic risk through strong public institutions and stable redistribution mechanisms. For decades, the model worked. Sustained growth, increased productivity, and balanced demographics. These conditions allowed for the expansion of social rights without jeopardizing fiscal stability. Today, the framework is different. Potential growth is lower, the population is aging, and pressure on structural spending is increasing. In this new context, it is worth asking whether a welfare state, which is the essence of our European model, is sustainable. In Catalonia and Spain, it depends fundamentally on four variables: productivity, the labor market, public funding, and the tax structure. Is the economy productive enough?

A state's capacity to sustain universal public services is directly linked to productivity. More productive economies generate higher wages and, therefore, greater tax revenue without the need for a significant increase in taxes. In the case of Catalonia and Spain, average productivity remains below that of the main countries in the European region. A significant portion of economic activity is concentrated in low value-added, labor-intensive sectors. This model is capable of generating employment but with limited revenue. The consequence is structural: with low-wage jobs, even if they have high value (such as elder care), the capacity of governments to expand or even maintain the current level of social spending is reduced. Without a transition towards capital-, technology-, and knowledge-intensive activities, the growth in public revenue will be insufficient to absorb demographic and social pressures.

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