The week ends with the hangover from yesterday's debate in Congress. Just 24 hours later, what we anticipated yesterday on the fly is already being confirmed: Sánchez's explanations arrived late, remain overshadowed by the reality of the thousands of people who are still wandering through Ceuta and, therefore, the Spanish president is doomed. Neither the opposition nor the investiture partners believe that Morocco had nothing to do with it (it is impossible for the illegal displacement of seventy thousand people to go unnoticed by a regime like Morocco) and therefore Sánchez moves between the figure of someone who, for the sake of state, does not want to antagonize a neighbor with the capacity to complicate your life and that of a president who is a victim of blackmail by Morocco. The fact that Sánchez is sentenced is a metaphor, but for the PP and Vox it is a wish. Feijóo said yesterday that “Sánchez will pay for his management, at the polls and in the courts”. And the fact is that Vox has long been reminding that Sánchez can be tried for treason, a procedure that is regulated in article 102 of the Constitution and which would be handled by the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court and which consists of an initiative by a quarter of the members of the Congress of Deputies and requires the approval of half plus one of the deputies (this would be 176), and the PP and Vox alone do not reach it, they are 169.Beyond when and how the legislative term ends, the case has other equally serious dimensions. For example, the power of Morocco, an ally of the United States, with a good relationship with Israel, and which receives money from the EU to regulate migratory flows. This gives it great bargaining power. As our head of International, Francesc Millan, explains today, in this column in which he draws the contrast between how the EU stands together when Russia attacks, but when the problem has been at its southern border, the problem was Spanish, not European. Mind you, while we talk about geopolitics, yesterday more than 80 people appeared dead on a migrant boat that arrived in the Canary Islands. The boat had left Gambia 26 days ago. After decades of apparently predictable life, we have entered the era of life under threat, a hybrid, indirect, disruptive threat that prevents making plans and living under the impression (more or less based on real events) that life depends on us and not on external, geopolitical factors.Speaking of violent disruptions, yesterday the film Cronos, about the attacks on La Rambla and Cambrils in July 2017.I had the opportunity to watch it and I recommend it to you. You start watching it with a knot in your stomach and you finish it the same way.The pace set by the director is very high and sustained, the script is clear, the acting is competent, and the production is well-resourced. The story is told, above all, from within the Mossos, from Trapero to the commanders who led the capture of the terrorists, which lasted four days, passing through the Mossos' communication director, Patrícia Plaja, and her impeccable crisis communication during those days. The political dispute between the Spanish government and the Generalitat over the management and information regarding the attack is noted, as well as the regrettable leak of The Mossos-The note to make the Mossos and the Generalitat look bad. What is not provided as context is that there was only a month and a half left until October 1st. And the state of shock in Ripoll is also well noted. Not so much the story of boys who were apparently integrated but were ripe for radicalization. But since we are talking about a two-hour film and not a six-part series, many narrative threads come to mind that remain to be unfolded.

You must have slept badly tonight because of the heat, and surely you can no longer stand living with a sweaty back. And when you see how the temperature line on the TV3 weather forecast climbs for this weekend, you could start crying. And in case you had any doubt, the shaky and sad voice of Meteocat had to tell us: Catalonia has experienced the hottest summer in its entire recorded history.

Pedro Sánchez appeared this morning in Congress and began by making a profession of Spanish identity: he recalled that the lions at the door of Congress were sculpted with bronze cast from cannons captured in Morocco in the 19th century and that Ceuta and Melilla will be Spanish “until the end of time”.He has built a narrative about the government's response, in fact, he has flooded the chamber with figures, data, days, and hours, a flood that he ended up summarizing in one figure: 72 hours after the mass entry, more than 90% of the people who entered, 63,000 people, had already returned to Morocco. And that this had been done in collaboration with Morocco. And that there was no police report warning of what was about to come:And he topped it off: he has ordered the publication of all police documents regarding prevention. He said that the government has nothing to hide.It is likely that Sánchez's explanations will not be of much use, politically. Because they arrive late, very late, weeks late, during which he has been on vacation. And because Ceuta is still not okay. And because the police report that El Español published yesterday points to Morocco, due to the passivity of the Moroccan police, and leaves Minister Marlaska exposed. Passivity that we all saw. Does the minister not control his police? Does he not have information from the police? Ceuta may be the end of Sánchez's escapade. Our journalist in Madrid, Núria Orriols, says so:“It will be difficult for him to get out of this, this time, Pedro Sánchez”.And because apart from the right and the far-right, which have long wanted him out of government and in prison, the mismanagement of Ceuta has left those who are horrified by the likely prospect of a PP and Vox government without arguments.Yesterday's demonstrations in the evening were about three things: in favor of Ceuta, against Sánchez, and making an apology for the far-right. All three things simultaneously. In what proportions? Ceuta first, yes, but it was the motive that legitimized and justified a protest. Without losing sight of the fact that when we say Ceuta we are talking about two things: the massive entry that the people of the city have been suffering for a month and the disastrous management of the Spanish government. It is a complicated panorama for Pedro Sánchez that we will see what repercussions it may end up having, but it is undoubtedly the biggest dent in the bodywork of a government that has already taken quite a few hits.Good morning.

Humanly, policially, and politically, it is understandable that the Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, wanted to deny that the alleged perpetrators of the Manresa homicide are unaccompanied minors. Humanly, to prevent a falsehood from spreading. Policially, because many people forget—or do not know—that at the end of last year, the Interior Department began including the nationality of detainees in its official crime reports, precisely for the sake of transparency. And politically, because the falsehood serves the interests of those who live electorally off the stigma against immigrants.

If you want to better understand the world we have started living in for the past few months, there are a couple of news items of the day that are very helpful.The day before yesterday, Pedro Sánchez stated that Morocco did not instigate the massive entry of people into Ceuta, that it had been the work of Russia and Israel, who had spread through the networks in Morocco that Spain was waiting for workers with open arms, so to speak. Putin himself has denied that Russia had anything to do with it, and the Israeli government has also denied it. But this morning, the digital newspaper El Español published that the Spanish police have informed the judge that the massive entry into Ceuta was guided by Moroccan gendarmes under the orders of plainclothes agents with the aim of collapsing the border control system and eliminating Spain's response capacity.

It has been months since Oriol Junqueras found in the population growth of Catalonia (from 6.2 million inhabitants in 2000 to 8.2 million currently, in just 25 years) an argument to debate what the demographic limits of our country should be so that public services, infrastructure, housing, natural resources, or the language are not irremediably overwhelmed. The debate is rational, even though in politics everything is emotional, and it is evident that the president of the Republicans has sought a way to establish a position of authority in the discourse on immigration that next year will change the face of the country's electoral map in favor of the far-right.

When the Minister of Education herself describes the PISA blunder as "very serious", when she admits that the problem could have been solved in time, when she reveals that the State warned on seven occasions about the error in the sample, almost everything has been said.Even more so: when the disaster costs the number two of the department her position, a senior official is subjected to disciplinary proceedings for “omissions that constitute carelessness or negligence in the fulfillment of established obligations” and two more proceedings are opened for serious misconduct against two civil servants for a “presumed breach of their obligations and duties as public officials”, it is pertinent to ask what is happening in the Department of Education, because we are not facing errors, but attitudes, attitudes sustained over time, so sustained (seven warnings!) that we join the hypothesis formulated today in our editorial that it was not bad faith. Was it a matter of excluding students from the sample who would probably perform poorly? Was it a matter of protecting the Government from the disrepute of a fall to even lower positions in the European school rankings? Or an attempt to harm it, considering that President Illa focused on the PISA report as soon as he took office as president, when he signed a collaboration agreement with the OECD in January 2025 to improve the skills of Catalan students in four years and redirect the results of the educational system? Well, not only has there been no redirection, but there has been an international failure of our Government, an executive that came to demonstrate good management, opposed to the independence fervor of a whole decade that was considered lost.

“It must be admitted that, today, governing is not easy at all. At least, not as easy as years ago”. I write the sentence in quotes because I hear it more and more often said in private by politicians from different parties, both from the Government and the opposition. They cite the impoverishment of workers, the lack of housing, media atomization and the impossibility of directing the narrative due to the multiplication of emitters, the hostile environment of social networks, the harm caused to people's pockets by political or economic decisions made thousands of kilometers away, the magnitude and frequency of natural disasters, etc. Some add bureaucracy, which slows down (when it doesn't drown) administrative processes, and the labor consequences that the deployment of AI may entail (Bill Gates has just stated that it is socially more dangerous than the technology industry admits).

We are happy to meet with you all as we begin this new season of daily analysis at l'ARA. Happy and especially responsible, because the 2026/27 academic year awaits us, which would be correct but frivolous to call "exciting". Because it will be a serious year. Just look at the crisis in Ceuta, the start of the school year with the same conflict it ended with, the expectation that the Supreme Court will finally apply the amnesty law and President Puigdemont will return, the possibility that Pedro Sánchez will advance the elections, the municipal elections in May, which will mean a first confirmation of the support that Aliança Catalana has in the polls and in conversations, the midterm elections in the United States, and that's without mentioning the open wars in Ukraine and Iran. And this is only what can be glimpsed, not to mention what Rubén Blades said, "life gives you surprises".

The Pope came, Spain won the World Cup, and the eclipse arrived exactly at the scheduled time, celebrated with confetti rain by the Government (and with the no less timely failure of Rodalies in its peerless role of spoilsport), but the joy by decree ended in Ceuta. And it still stirs. And wait for it.I was able to verify the psychological impact of the news while being thousands of kilometers from home, because the images of tens of thousands of poor people disorderly entering another country produce the same primary shiver down all spines: they are invading us.It is clear that, to our horror, what still causes the most horribilis of the Spanish government, null in detection and anticipation, incredibly slow and clumsy in management, with Sánchez on vacation, the Minister of Defense and the Minister of the Interior contradicting each other, the European Union alarmed and with Aznar going there to give the speech of a thousand men, as if teaching the king how to react when the homeland is in danger. If Morocco wanted to cause another deep crisis in the Spanish government, it has succeeded again. If it has done so in coordination with Trump's agenda ("Spain is a horrible ally", "Spain is a lost cause"), it has seemed so. Even for a professional resistor like Sánchez, Ceuta may have meant the end of the escape.Meanwhile, thousands of people are struggling to survive in Ceuta, used by Morocco and rejected by Spain. Any human response must take into account that in this world of verbal and legal cruelty that presidents like the one in the United States are imposing, whatever they do to the assailants of Ceuta, they will find a way to do it to us the day they decide we are a nuisance.

There is a way of describing personality that has become popular in recent times, which is to call a person "intense". Some time ago, we might have said they were a pest, that they always made a mountain out of a molehill, or that they were an exaggerator. But all these would be incomplete attributes.

This is the last analysis of the season and, therefore, it is time to take stock. If we talk about moods, we arrive at the holidays worried because many folders have not been closed: the amnesty has not yet reached the exiles or the main disqualified individuals, the new financing system is very slow, almost as slow as the improvement of the Rodalies service or the Adif works, and the education system in Catalonia, which left for the holidays amidst strikes and will begin equally amidst protests, has hit rock bottom with the discrediting of the Department of Education and the lamentable final episode of the PISA tests. It only remains for us to know that the ministry warned the department in April 2025 (and not, as had been said, in March 2026), that there was a very high student exclusion rate, but the warning went from technicians to technicians and they did not communicate it to the top of the political sphere. Why? It is not known and this fuels suspicions that since the results of the tests would be very bad, no one wanted to take responsibility for the hot potato. In fact, the explanations were given at the end of July, late and poorly, and it is all a jumble of inconcisions about departments that were being reformed or the coincidence with other tests. All this does not generate confidence.It has been a year of protests in education, healthcare, and farming. Social discontent related to the loss of purchasing power has continued to grow. Because unemployment has fallen to pre-2008 crisis levels and everyone has a job, but salaries don't cover the end of the month. Housing is a pipe dream, while we hear about the construction of thousands of social and affordable rental apartments by the Generalitat. To be fair, these are measures that can generate a sustained supply for all budgets, but of course, apartments are not built overnight.We are checking the effects of the enormous demographic growth that Catalonia has experienced in the last 25 years. Those of us who are of a certain age still remember the announcement of "we are 6 million", and today we have already passed 8 and some are talking about 10. The seams of the country have burst everywhere and subsumed by common regime autonomous policies, we do not have the necessary fiscal and budgetary sovereignty to make a country tailor-made for us. That state investments in Catalonia in 2025 were 8.6% is outrageous. A consequence of this panorama is the electoral boom that Catalan Alliance will experience next year in the municipal elections according to all the polls, a boom that would announce a surpassing in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia which, if not brought forward, would be in the spring of 2028. There is citizen exhaustion, a loss of confidence in the usual parties and leaderships, the ghost of existential linguistic anguish has reappeared and we have not fully recovered from the Process's Dragon Khan. If we add to this the great capacity of the far-right to turn the most primary identity drives into votes, the demographic future indicates that in Catalonia the same thing will end up happening that has already happened in other places in Europe and the world.The country has talent, it retains the knack for doing things well, it has reserves of self-esteem, and it has seen it all to be able to react to adversity. The country is more solid than it currently appears and it falters just as everyone falters. The problem is that it lacks the minimum sovereignty needed to make its own decisions. And for all of this, we go on vacation (and we are thankful for it) knowing that next season we will face the same problems and that the current solutions will fall short.Good summer and see you soon.

That Pedro Sánchez is the smartest in the class and gives Alberto Núñez Feijóo fifty communicative turns (as is being seen these days every time the PP leader opens his mouth at the scene of the fire) does not mean that the tricks of the dialectical sleight of hand he practices are not visible from three hours away. In the political year review that he presented today, Sánchez recalled that in 2018, when he arrived at Moncloa, 40% of Catalans stated that one of their main problems was the relationship between Catalonia and the general state administration, and that, on the other hand, today, this percentage is only 2%.

Finally, yesterday we were able to hear the explanations that the Minister of Education, Esther, Niubó, gave in Parliament about the PISA tests disaster. Her intervention is summarized in this headline:“The Government has not clarified the origin of the PISA tests error”. The minister admitted the error, assumed “its seriousness”, cleared the centers, therefore, accepted that the responsibility lay with the Department of Education, but four months later she still does not know whose it is. And, at most, she ventured a hypothesis: that since on the same dates there were other exams organized by the Department, perhaps the coincidence of days led to the error in the sample.Niubó: “This means that the same 51 educational centers that were PISA samples also had to apply, with very little time difference, two assessments subject to different frameworks, that of PISA and the end-of-stage tests for fourth year of ESO, which, as I said before, were census-based last year and all students took them. And this similarity of percentages, combined with the fact that they were the same centers, with a coinciding schedule, but with different frameworks applied almost at the same time, allows us to suggest that confusion could have been generated at the center about the criteria to be used, transferring to the PISA tests exemption criteria or non-participation practices specific to the Catalan end-of-stage tests. But, I insist, this is a hypothesis.”It is inadmissible that the Government still does not have the conclusions of a problem it was warned about in March. And in this regard, President Illa's comments, who is in Vietnam on an official trip these days, do not help at all. The president said yesterday: "It's not about blaming anyone." President, let's see, we are not playing cards, this is not about blame, but rather we are scrutinizing a serious error that, incidentally, greatly harms the narrative of a government that defined itself by its management (by good management, it is understood) in contrast to the "collision" pro-State independence governments, which were focused on conflict and not on what really matters to people. And when someone makes a serious mistake, it is necessary to identify who has slipped up, who has not done their job well. This talk of blame is a dialectical way out to give the appearance of seriousness to an internal review that is not being very serious because, as I said, four months have passed and all the minister can say is that she is still in the realm of hypotheses. Of course not all of the problems in education in Catalonia are in the department of education, but in view of its limited capacity to deal with them, it is clear that one of the problems in education in Catalonia is the department responsible for it, now and before. And I end up talking about Mallorca. Yesterday we denounced police violence against the protesters of “Less tourism and more life”. There is a painful contrast between civic concern, expressed peacefully, and the abuse of power with which it was met. And on this subject I want to reproduce a fragment of today's article by the Mallorcan Sebastià Alzamora, who says it with much more precise words, as befits someone who lives there:“Mallorcans, as a society, have a certain reputation for being apathetic and conformist. I won't say it's not a reputation that is deserved to some extent, but it has a more interesting flip side. This same society also forms a country of sensible and elegant people, with a deep allergy to bad manners, rudeness, exaggerated gestures, and violence in any form. For the citizens of this country called Mallorca, there are few things less interesting than losing one's temper and irony, becoming overbearing, solemn, or intransigent. And let's not even mention becoming aggressive: all of this, in Mallorca, is frankly frowned upon. If even reasonable proposals, expressed in a civic manner, are met with batons, in the end the government will have nothing left. Because as Alzamora says, “On Sunday, something institutional broke.”Good morning.

What is the National Police in Mallorca afraid of? Of thousands of peaceful and organized citizens? Of people who suffer for the land and for the future of their children? Of seeing them wave the four bars and hear them demonstrate in Catalan? What interests does this police force protect when it raises its batons against demonstrators? Will the head of the police operation be dismissed, even if only for incompetence?

The Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, is appearing this afternoon in Parliament to explain the Generalitat's incredible failure to organize the PISA tests. As we know, the story could not be more lamentable, no matter how you look at it: the OECD warned in March. No information was given until July, until a Friday at the end of July, to be exact, when they sent a director general to face the music and not the minister, and they describe an error in the sample of students examined, which far exceeds any explainable decimal error, as a specific and technical problem.As we explain today, the alteration of the PISA sample in Catalonia far exceeds that of any country in the latest report. It reminded me of the day when the Generalitat, under the presidency of Pere Aragonès, did not know how to correctly convene a competitive examination. With the difference that this PISA issue is an international embarrassment. And I prefer to believe it was a (serious) fiasco rather than have to think it's a way to circumvent results that will be poor given the problems that have been affecting Education in Catalonia for years. It is enough to remember that we finished the course amidst strikes and we will start it the same way. The problem with Education is in the classrooms, which are a reflection of all of society's problems, in the training of teachers, in the authority of principals, in the tension of an inclusive school that lacks the means to be worthy of the name, in a Catalonia that has been getting poorer, etc. But something is happening in the Department of Education and, by extension, in the Government, when it signs a union pact that inflames the unions, closes an agreement with the OECD to improve teaching, and, one year later, makes a big mistake in the sample for the PISA tests. And in another order of indignation, we have the multitudinous demonstration yesterday in Palma de Mallorca against the excess of tourism that has led the island, like the rest of the Balearic Islands, to collapse. There is no need for many explanations as to why the protest, because in Catalonia we know well what tourist collapse is, which affects ecology, mobility, housing, culture, language, etc. The manifesto of the call has a quite explicit paragraph on the effect of tourism: “It invaded our coasts, then our towns and our cities and is currently occupying our homes. Mallorca cannot fit any more hotels, cannot fit any more coffee franchises, fast food or cheesecakes, and cannot fit any more tourists! Mallorca at its limit! Less tourism, more life!” Such a demonstration is a sign that must be listened to and attended to with urgency. But everything suggests that it will not be so, for now, because the Balearic government and tourist interests are one. The proof is what happened in the end:

The magnitude of the fires these days in the Valencian Community, in Spain and in France is making headlines in newspapers worldwide, accompanied by reflections of the type of whether it is reasonable to go on vacation in July in Western Europe, with these heat waves that turn a simple walk between the Sagrada Família and Casa Batlló into something akin to a painful trek across the asphalt desert.The phenomenon is not just European, of course. Hours before the World Cup final, smoke from fires in Canada was noticeable in New York City, just as they are now breathing in Madrid the smoke from fires in Castilla. The planet speaks and says that if we continue with the business as usual there will be no individual salvation.If you go to appliance stores or large retailers, they will explain that for weeks, apart from air conditioning units, they have been selling nothing but ceiling fans that, due to their price and consumption, have become the star element of the kit for summer survival for poorly ventilated rooms and generally torrid nights.The contrast between the damage that climate change is already doing to us and the slowness of the response is as scandalous as the economic interests strongly infiltrated in politics that aspire to plunder the planet until they take the last euro. That summer chronicles about the anxieties of thousands of people evacuated from their homes due to fires are now commonplace, and that devastating fires have become a kind of reverse annual lottery, is the end of an era, in which even clichés are up for discussion. Let's see how we maintain that in summer everything is alive and well.

No matter how you look at it, the fiasco of the Department of Education with the PISA tests cannot be justified: the OECD discovered and communicated the error in March, but the Generalitat has not reported it until now, four months later, on a Friday in late July. But we should not see any will of "concealment" and "manipulation".Even though four months have already passed, some "preliminary informative proceedings of a reserved nature" are still open to find out what might have happened, but it is not ruled out that it may have coincided with another basic competencies exam and with a "transition process" between the old Superior Council of Evaluation and the new Agency for Evaluation and Prospective of Education, and to prevent it from happening again, the Commission for Coordination of Evaluation Tests and Studies has been created.Instead of applying the maximum exclusion rate of 5% of students, a rate of 23.3% was applied, a circumstance that the Director General of Curriculum and Professional Development, who comes out to face the music (and not the minister), describes as an "technical, isolated and isolated incident". Total: the PISA test results that will be published in September will not be comparable with other territories or with other previous years in Catalonia.It is a national and international ridicule for the Generalitat, because Catalonia participates in the OECD's PISA tests with its own sample and because, seeing that in the last exam in 2022 Catalan students were below the average for the OECD, Europe, and Spain, President Illa signed an agreement with the OECD to lift the results. Well, for now, before knowing how the students have done, it is the Catalan administration that has failed. In education, we are playing with the future, and it has been too long since we have been doing well.

Asked during the World Cup by the newspaper ABC about his simple image and the fact that he didn't have tattoos, Pau Cubarsí replied that he didn't have them now and probably wouldn't in the future, that he felt “comfortable with my hair combed forward like the rest of the guys my age, and that's enough,” and added: “You can be a footballer without having tattoos,” a phrase that went straight to the interview's headline and which, four weeks later, could have been improved with “you can be the best young player in the World Cup without having tattoos.”