It is better to remain silent and appear foolish than to speak and remove all doubt. For many years, Florentino Pérez has cultivated his image as a powerful man by managing his silences and using spokespeople of all kinds to deliver his messages. This formula has served him well in forging an image of a person who pulls the strings from the shadows to achieve his aims and bend wills. But on Tuesday, he broke his silence, and in just one hour of a press conference, he displayed arrogance, haughtiness, and irritation because things are not going his way.The president of Real Madrid presented himself to the media as a victim of journalists, a victim of a media conspiracy, a victim of a hostile environment that, according to him, is obsessed with harming his club and his personal image. But this idea of a defenseless man does not quite fit with reality, because he holds large shares of economic, media, and institutional power. He has been president of Real Madrid for twenty-six years, since July 18, 2000, ruling the white club with an iron fist, and now aspires to exceed thirty years in office if he wins the elections he has called. At the same time, he controls an international business conglomerate that invoices tens of billions and employs 170,000 workers. All this has allowed him to weave a network of complicities at all levels, which until today seemed indestructible.No matter how much some try to rewrite history, Real Madrid has historically been the team of the regime. Its proximity to political, economic, and media power has been structural and has yielded evident benefits for decades. The collusion with the State's elites has never been hidden; on the contrary, it has been displayed with absolute naturalness. Also, the large real estate operations that have allowed the club to obtain extraordinary resources, a kind of economic doping that has facilitated sustaining pharaonic sporting projects and always competing with an advantage over many rivals.Florentino Pérez represents this way of understanding football: multimillion-dollar signings, permanent grandiloquence, and a triumphalist narrative built with a deep pocket. When things are going well, he appears as the great visionary. But when the ball stops going in, the project never fails. There are always external enemies ready to conspire against Madrid. And this time the culprits are the journalists.The season that is now ending has been sportingly devastating for the white club, and the final touch has been a defeat at the Camp Nou that has given the League to Barça. It is already known that in football, when the ball doesn't go in, everything that seemed solid is questioned. And when the triumphant narrative cracks, then everything is urgency and the worst version of a leader accustomed to controlling everything emerges.Florentino Pérez offered an exhibition of resentment and arrogance unbecoming of someone with his experience. In just one hour, he managed to portray himself as a leader deeply irritated by any dissenting voice. He pointed out people by name and surname, and fed fake news about supposed refereeing privileges for Barça. And all seasoned, as usually happens, with a paternalistic and sexist tone that some still confuse with friendliness.Powerful people tend to be distrustful, surely as a defense mechanism to protect themselves from self-interested and opportunistic individuals. They talk to many people, but trust no one. Or even worse: they only listen to those who tell them exactly what they want to hear, and those who dare to contradict them, even if they do so honestly, end up marginalized. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that there was no one minimally sensible in Florentino's circle who was capable of advising him not to appear before the media with that tone. Resentment weighed more than intelligence, and the result has been a genuine communication disaster that cannot be disguised even by the court of jesters who, like Josep Pedrerol, have come to the rescue to cover up their master's shame.The Madrid of power has been in shock for a few days. The detonator is an undeniable sporting crisis of a team without soul or project, but in the end, everything has been talked about except football. When such a powerful club dedicates more energy to chasing media phantoms than to analyzing its sporting errors, it means something profound is cracking. And that is probably what most worries those in the Bernabéu box today. Not so much having lost titles as having started to lose control of the narrative.

When Alberto Núñez Feijóo arrived in Madrid, he did so with the aura of a capable, moderate, and predictable manager. He came from governing Galicia with everything under control, and his conciliatory approach seemed ideal for reclaiming the center ground that Pablo Casado had squandered in his failed bid for the leadership of the People's Party (PP). Feijóo was then the symbol of a right wing that wanted to become serious again, capable of inspiring confidence among the middle class and presenting itself as an alternative to Pedro Sánchez.

We all agree that it is unacceptable for people to be arrested hundreds of times for petty theft and robbery, only to then continue acting with impunity on our streets. Understandably, this reality generates frustration, distrust, and a perception of failure in both the police and judicial systems, which is always exploited by those who do not hesitate to manipulate it for political gain.

The Attorney General sitting in the dock at the Supreme Court is an unusual sight, almost unthinkable in any mature democracy. This week, Álvaro García Ortiz was tried for the alleged crime of revealing secrets following the leak of an email related to the tax fraud case against the partner of the Madrid regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Beyond the specific case, the image is extraordinarily symbolic. It is the State judging the State.

The most serious political espionage in Spain's recent history is on track to go unpunished. The case Pegasus, which takes its name from the spyware developed by the Israeli company NSO Group used to infect the phones of dozens of pro-independence representatives, has gradually faded away over time, buried under the weight of institutional opacity and judicial apathy. What should have shaken the democratic foundations of the state has ended up becoming a bureaucratic nightmare, with no one responsible, no reparations, and, above all, no truth.

After the hangover from the reform of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia and while waiting for the ruling of the Constitutional Court that ended up cutting it, the image of the angry CatalanIt was a way of putting words to the accumulated weariness caused by Spain's systematic discriminatory treatment of Catalonia. That collective irritation was fueled by a historical grievance—fiscal, cultural, linguistic, jurisdictional—that seemed to have reached its limit. Catalan political movement knew how to channel this discontent into a shared cause, which culminated in the independence process, with the outcome known to all.

Pedro Sánchez is on the ropes. The corruption cases involving two of his closest collaborators, the former PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) organizational secretaries, José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán, have left the Spanish president breathless, losing credibility and control of the situation. And since everything is likely to get worse, the public confrontation with Donald Trump over military spending is a move with an uncertain trajectory that could cause him many headaches.

This Tuesday, the National Language Pact was signed, an agreement that aims to promote the social use of Catalan and reverse a worrying trend: the continued decline our language has suffered since the beginning of the 21st century. This pact comes after years in which the language had ceased to be a political priority despite evidence of decline. It was under the government of President Pere Aragonès that the foundations for this pact, now signed, were laid, with the aim of placing Catalan once again at the center of public debate and national policies.

"Who do you believe, me or your own eyes?" This famous line from Groucho Marx in the movie Goose soup It perfectly sums up the farce of the appearances before the Congress of Deputies committee on Operation Catalunya. The festival of denials, selective forgetting, and textbook cynicism that has featured figures such as Mariano Rajoy, Jorge Fernández Díaz, María Dolores de Cospedal, and Alicia Sánchez-Camacho is the modus operandi of those who feel unpunished and protected by the structures of the State.

You make the laws and leave the regulations to me. The Count of Romanones's famous phrase resonates these days across the Catalan political scene after Junts per Catalunya and the PSOE reached an agreement to delegate certain immigration-related powers to Catalonia. After many months of negotiations and the promise to initiate a comprehensive transfer of immigration powers, including ultimatums and a vote of confidence that was ultimately withdrawn, both parties have submitted a bill to Congress to formalize this delegation, although many questions remain about its actual implementation.

Salvador Illa's first six months as president of the Generalitat have been marked by apparent stability despite the precariousness of his parliamentary majority. Without the capacity to approve the 2025 budget or a clear legislative agenda, his government finds itself in an arithmetic situation identical to that of the Republican government of Pere Aragonès, but Isla and the PSC have managed to establish a narrative of governability that allows them to move forward without strong opposition or significant social mobilization.

"All the just causes in the world have their defenders. However, Catalonia has only us". This Lluís Companys quote referring to the Catalan nation is perfectly applicable to the Catalan language. In Catalonia's recent history we have experienced great debates about the Catalan language, too often stirred up by Madrid parties and media groups that have sought to win votes in Spain by attacking language immersion in schools in order to fuel the discourse of hatred. In few places around the world would we find examples where there are people who prefer their children to learn only one language when they can learn two.

Last April, when we still had no idea how the pandemic would affect us but we could already see that the effects would be devastating, I wrote in these same pages that, when we put this health crisis behind us, what would remain for history would be the number of deaths. The stream of data and indicators that we process every day to try to understand where we are and what can happen to us will be quickly forgotten, but when we explain to future generations how dramatic the times of the pandemic were, we will sum it up by highlighting the deaths it caused. As in any catastrophe, this is usually the macabre unit of measurement.