According to most forecasts, Donald Trump could lose the Republican majority in one of the two chambers of the United States Congress this Tuesday, or both. It would be logical: the cost of living has skyrocketed and people directly relate the poor state of their pockets to bad presidential decisions, especially the Iran war.

In the end, there were no riots or incidents in Barcelona on Saturday afternoon. But that doesn't mean nothing happened. The deployment of the Mossos and the Guàrdia Urbana was very visible, and it had been announced so far in advance that it surely deterred potential rioters. The identification of young people was constant and numerous. Most shops in the Gran Via - Passeig de Gràcia area were either closed or had their windows protected with wooden panels, and all of them without exception had security guards at the door. It was a strange afternoon, with people dressed for Halloween oblivious to everything, people in Barça shirts going to the Camp Nou, tourists, and many fewer people than a typical Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday morning, in the center of Barcelona there were still workers covering the windows and ATMs of bank offices, as if a hurricane were coming and we were in Miami.

I hear Minister Puente's explanations and, as much as they might interest me, I cannot help but receive them as a distant litany that neither informs me nor, even less, comforts me. Because the damage is already done. Because there have already been 116 deaths on Spanish trains this year. Because since his first reaction of pointing the finger at the control center operator only hours after the accident (an accusation reinforced at night with the leaking of the audios), the minister can keep giving data, but I only hear excuses with which he tries to shed as much responsibility as he can.

At the time of the morning that I am speaking to you, Minister Óscar Puente has not yet appeared, who has called a press conference in Urda. The still-minister Puente, we should say, because he should have already resigned. To demand his resignation, the three fatal accidents this year, with a total toll of 116 deaths, would be enough. But today it is even more evident what we perceived on the first day, at Puente's first press conference: the desire to shirk any blame and point the finger at the control center operator. It was not enough for him to point it out on the first day, but yesterday he leaked the audio of the conversations between the control center and the drivers of the trains that collided, in an attempt to reinforce the idea that it was all due to human error. If a single person can cause a tragedy like this, it is because everything is poorly set up. If Puente's railway management was superb, the informative management of the accident has been indecent. Sánchez must know what he is doing, but this third tragedy (Adamuz, Gelida, Urda), if they insist on saying that it is a worker's fault, will sweep them away electorally.

I don't know about you, but this week, around Barcelona, I've been told more than once: “I’m not moving from home on Saturday”. There are people who are afraid of going down to the city center and running into violent hooded individuals who destroy shop windows, loot stores, and burn cars and motorcycles to build barricades. The Mossos d'Esquadra and the Urban Guard are preparing a maximum-effort security operation, highly visible, and the tactic for dealing with the violent protesters will not be the same. Let’s hope it’s not necessary. And that, if it is, it works.

We have been talking about nothing but the train accident in Toledo for 24 hours now, where 68 people have died as of yesterday, for the moment. So I take all the preliminaries as read. Political consequences: trains in Toledo, where 68 people have died as of yesterday, for the moment. So I take all the preliminaries as read. Political consequences: Óscar Puente cannot continue to be minister of Transport for even one more minute. This year 2026, 115 people have been killed on Spanish trains: 46 in Andalusia, 1 in Gelida and 68 in Toledo. And one accident is a tragedy. Three accidents with 115 deaths are not just three tragedies. They are the system.

Minister Puente invited us yesterday to add two plus two without saying four: "The decision is made for the train that impacts the Iryo [stopped] to resume its journey normally. It is inexplicable [...]. It is an erroneous decision [...]. It is truly implausible". So, the fault was not with the system, but with a person. Except for naming them, he pointed them out clearly.

The morning has begun with a serious train accident in Spain. Two high-speed trains have collided in the province of Toledo, south of Madrid. An Iryo and an AVE. They did not collide head-on but from the rear, one that was moving against one that was stationary. It seems the train driver had not received the message that there was a stationary train ahead because the electronic system that was supposed to inform them was not working and the control center did not warn them. As a result of the impact, two carriages have fallen down an embankment and, as I speak to you, Civil Protection has reported 46 deaths, but the death toll may worsen. We still do not know why it happened, but it is impossible not to think about the accident in Andalusia, in Adamuz, in the month of January, where 46 people also died.

The debate has returned regarding the duty of parents to monitor the social networks their children navigate.

Tonight it was the turn of the Basque Country, in Bilbao, chaos in the streets. Burning of dumpsters, burning of cars and motorcycles, running, 19 arrested by the Ertzaintza, of which 11 are minors, at the end of an event called by Vito Quiles. The Basque police, by the way, were surprised because it took them an hour to start intervening.

Precisely today, Lula da Silva turns 81. On Sunday he received the best gift to celebrate them. He is a bit older than Trump, who turned 80 in the month of June. And they are not the oldest heads of state: the King of Saudi Arabia is 90, the same age as the president of the Palestinian National Authority. And both are surpassed by the president of Cameroon, who is 93.

Saturday's violence in Barcelona has changed the conversation. In September it was Ceuta, then Maricarmen Abascal and, now, the evening of broken glass in Barcelona, with the threat that next Saturday we will be back at it. What do we know and what do we not know about what happened? The most important thing is what we do not know: who summoned these young people via TikTok?

The novelty of Saturday's violence was, according to the Mossos, that the hooded individuals did not carry out the classic action of hiding at the tail end of an organized protest demonstration, but rather were summoned on TikTok, met up via WhatsApp in groups of no more than 15 or 20 youths (this, in their jargon, is called “the funnel”), planted themselves in the center of Barcelona and started destroying and looting. In a word, the violent ones began breaking windows, skipping the preliminaries. And the police were surprised by the virulence and the impact.

Tomorrow's Barça is like the student who goes to an exam having studied. Better yet: they go to the exam having understood what the subject is about and they master it. That is why I await the match with all the excitement that gives me all the tranquility possible. Barça has started the season doing things very well and Madrid has not, and I refer to the standings: full of victories and an average of more than four goals per match. And it is not just from now. Barça has already been the League champion for two years.

After 9 years of exile, deputy Lluís Puig was able to return yesterday to sit in his seat at the Parliament. His emotion contrasted with the coldness with which he was received by the socialist group, at the head of which President Illa was not present, perhaps because it is one thing to have converted to the faith of the amnesty when his friend Pedro Sánchez has needed Junts to be invested as president and another to appear alongside someone who has not been to prison and who for nine years has been characterized as a “fugitive” (in reality, not a fugitive at all, because the exiles have always been, from the first day, at the disposal of the Belgian justice system (or German or Italian in the case of Puigdemont).

When in some French cities they have banned demonstrations or when the Paris government wants to control the networks because that is where the agitation orders pass through, it is because social unrest has definitively infiltrated the heart of the system of freedoms, with a capacity for penetration capable of rusting all the parts of a democracy's engine.

Nine years later, Lluís Puig returned yesterday to his city, Terrassa, where he was received with tears of emotion by the people of Terrassa who every day, for more than 3,000 days, have met in the evening to sing for freedom. Oriol Junqueras and Raül Romeva were also honored in Sant Vicenç dels Horts. Puig will go to Parliament this afternoon and will sit in his seat, until now occupied by a yellow ribbon. The discourse of those amnestied oscillated between returning to where we were and the idea that they have won a battle against Spain. Is that so?

It is enough to take an early subway in the morning to see if there are hardworking people who keep the world running. They remind me of Espinàs, who preferred to write until dawn and who said he got up late because he trusted fully that his fellow citizens would raise the shutters.

Those who were political prisoners are already amnestied. This morning, the minister Lluís Puig tweeted: