There are strong, heavy, labyrinthine, relentless states. There are also failed ones. In the case of Spain, I leave the qualifying adjective to you, but the fact is that we would not be talking about either decisive or pragmatic. Perhaps the majority of our society is not either? That is a topic for another day.

Whatever your age, you who are reading this article know that technology is moving faster than human capacity to adapt to a new perception of reality. We have become a kind of overwhelmed jugglers or tightrope walkers traversing a cable far above our heads. I don't know if we have always been surpassed by technology throughout history; I suspect so, but never with such great acceleration, on so many fronts at once, and with such extensive shared knowledge of the metamorphosis we are immersed in as a society.

Franco had just died, Arias Navarro was still president and the country lived between hope and fear. In this context, fifty years ago, the Rally for Freedom was held, the first major democratic political event authorized in Catalonia since the end of the war, which boosted the PSC and gathered 15,000 people. Raimon Obiols (Barcelona, 1940) was one of the participants and this year the Government, through the Directorate General of Democratic Memory, and the Rafael Campalans Foundation paid tribute to him at the Barcelona Bar Association.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Few political formulas have had such a long life and such great force as these words from the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Approved on July 4, 1776, they represent a historical break: power could not derive from blood, from the crown, or from divine will, but from the rights of individuals and the consent of the governed.

Our interview takes place in Olot’s old Barberí foundry, converted into the studio and beating heart of RCR Arquitectes. Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta discuss returning to Olot, the decision to always work together, landscape as an ally, the Pritzker Prize as freedom and responsibility, and their Vila as a cultural and life project.

The floodgates of political contempt have long been open in Spain, and the water of mutual contempt between the opposition and the government is at a record level. The worst thing is not that they mutually detest each other and permanently show it, but the effects this has on public opinion which will one day go to vote.

The weekly The Economist, with a hard-won reputation for rigor and liberalism, also excels – like The New Yorker or Libération– on its covers. A few years ago, one was dedicated to Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had just arrived at Downing Street, asking: "Is Bambi a carnivore?”. Over the years and the Iraq War, the British Labourite proved to be not only a carnivore but also an anthropophage.

His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) catapulted him to global fame. But even then, the French economist Thomas Piketty had been one of the most respected names in economic theory for over a decade, as co-founder of the Paris School of Economics and co-creator of the World Inequality Database. A specialist in the study of inequalities and wealth distribution, Piketty now presents the Global Justice Report, an ambitious economic roadmap that outlines how global inequality can be eliminated and the climate crisis curbed before 2100.

"The poor have understood many things", the Pope said in the Canary Islands on the same day that Space X went public and Elon Musk became the richest man in history. What we don't know is what the South African has learned humanly. Only the speed and vertigo of the changes we are going through explain that the confusion we are experiencing does not explode. In Spain, political confusion turns a pope into a moral reference in a Congress of Deputies poisoned by polarization, which applauds him unanimously for seven minutes. Each one ready to use him in their own way. It is the same confusion that turns Musk, a textbook unbalanced person with zero humanist capacity, into another reference of our times.

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.