Glòria Freixa (Barcelona, 1969) says she is running in the primaries for her children. She exudes drive and conviction.

The papal visit has left a lot of headlines and striking images, and at a superficial glance it can be said that it has come as a balm for Pedro Sánchez. But the real headline left by this visit is that, once again, it has become clear that the supposed non-confessionality of the State is more apparent than real, and that the weight and influence of the Catholic Church are of such magnitude that even civil powers bow before it.

Thirty-four years later, Barcelona is once again dazzling the world while Madrid sees that three decades of turbo-capitalism and concentration of resources and power have not served it to shorten distances with the Catalan capital when it comes to achieving a global impact like that of 1992. Thirty-four years later, Madrid has not only not had the Olympic Games, but has had to see how the blessing ceremony of the tower of Jesus of the Sagrada Família by Leo XIV has taken all the praise and headlines in the world press and left the visit of the Pope himself to the Spanish capital a few days earlier in an absolute second place. And this without going into comparing the quality of what has been seen in Catalonia in recent days (cathedral, Lluís Companys stadium, Brians, Montserrat and Sant Agustí) with the events in Madrid, particularly the performances with an evangelistic air at the Santiago Bernabéu.

At what point did Pedro Sánchez become the number 1 enemy of this triumvirate made up of the Spanish right, the deep state and the Madrid establishment? We can place this point of no return in May 2021, when the president of the government announced his intention to pardon the Catalan political prisoners. That was the turning point, the inflection point. Sánchez was no longer one of them.

When all the polls, and even more so after the blue wave of May 28, predict a more or less tight victory for the right-wing bloc in the State on July 23, the CIS does exactly the opposite. According to the organization led by José Félix Tezanos, the left not only does not retreat, but advances, as both the PSOE and Sumar could improve their results to the point of bordering on an absolute majority. On the other hand, the PP and Vox would not reach it in any case.

On April 15, 2004, the first session of the investiture debate of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was held. At the end of his speech, the candidate delivered a quote, the authorship of which he did not reveal, to summarize his ideology: "An infinite yearning for peace, love for the good and for the social betterment of the humble." It was later revealed that these words had been written by his grandfather, Captain Juan Rodríguez Lozano, just before being shot by the Francoists in August 1936 in Puente Castro (León). Lozano remained loyal to the republican legality and paid for it with his life. His figure, and especially his testament, greatly influenced Rodríguez Zapatero, who over the years would become the first descendant of Francoism victims to reach La Moncloa (Felipe González had been born into a well-off family in Seville).

The European Union aims to move towards strategic autonomy in defence matters, and Catalonia and Euskadi cannot be left out. This has been one of the points of agreement between former president Pere Aragonès and former lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu, who starred in the final act of the conferences on economics organised by the University of Vic under the leadership of the former republican leader. The moderator of the conversation was the director of ARA, Esther Vera, who asked both of them to choose a specific area in which Europe should take a step forward. Urkullu's response was immediate: "We need a European industrial policy". Aragonès took up the challenge, doubling down on the proposal: "We must move towards a European army, less of a Spanish and French army. And this is not just about manufacturing tanks, it's more about technology than gunpowder".

Sometimes victory tastes like defeat. This is the case for Juanma Moreno Bonilla's PP in Andalusia. From a historical perspective, the result of these elections does nothing more than consolidate conservative hegemony in a territory that had been a stronghold of socialist votes. But politically, for Moreno Bonilla and his Andalusian and moderate path, having to make a deal with Vox is a tragedy because it affects the core of his political discourse. We will have to see how he manages it after having said that the dilemma of these elections was "either an absolute majority or chaos".

Catalonia concentrates such a diversity and complexity that it is a kind of Port Aventura of politics, where you have everything multiplied by two and sometimes apparently contradictory processes intertwine.

Xavier Antich (la Seu d'Urgell, 1962) arrives at the newsroom of ARA just as the vote of the members to elect the new board of Òmnium Cultural begins, in which he is running for re-election with a transversal candidacy of Catalanism and without rivals.What has led you to run for re-election at a time when there is debate about whether leadership needs to be renewed?

How can you run a newspaper that is in Trump's crosshairs? Journalist Martin Baron did it between 2016 and 2020 when he was at the helm of the iconic Washington Post, and in front of an audience full of colleagues and journalism students, he explains what his obsession was: "To prevent Trump from getting into my head." The objective was, therefore, that he would not condition his work as director. "As journalists, we must ignore the attacks and focus on doing our job: uncovering the facts, contextualizing them, and disseminating them. He [Trump] said he was at war with the media. And I replied that we were not at war with him, we were simply doing our job, dedicated to the First Amendment of the Constitution." It is unlikely that the young students listening will receive a lesson as profound as that of the veteran American journalist, winner of 16 Pulitzer Prizes, one of them for uncovering the scandal of abuse in the Church at the Boston Globe.

When Jordi Pujol created CDC in 1974, he was not only founding a party, but also articulating an entire social sector, caricatured by his adversaries as the shopkeeper, but which encompassed everyone from the middle and artisan classes to small business owners and the self-employed, as well as farmers and skilled workers. Pujol also endowed Convergència, and by extension CiU, with a political identity that pivoted on two key points: an unshakeable commitment to Catalonia, on the one hand, and a certain ideological flexibility and preference for pacts, on the other. This space evolved from a pragmatic nationalism, in favor of the peix al cove (fish in the basket), to independentism with Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont. But it has remained, in its main coordinates, grouped around Junts. This political space is now in danger with the emergence of Aliança Catalana, which represents, from the far right, an amendment in its entirety to the Pujolista DNA.

El Mundo publishes exclusively this Monday the WhatsApp messages regarding the expulsion of Javier Ortega Smith from Vox. The information is quite revealing, because it shows that it is not enough to agree on it with the leadership, but that it must then be executed in a very specific way, which is by also expelling Javier Ortega Smith from the formation's WhatsApp groups. And this apparently was not so simple. In one of the screenshots published by the newspaper, it can be seen how the general secretary, Ignacio Garriga, informs of the decision in one of these groups: "Javier, the national executive committee has unanimously agreed (19 yeses) on your dismissal as a member. Please, leave the group".

It is already known that the first victim of a war is truth and that, for governments, especially in times of war, doing journalism is unpatriotic because certain sensitive information cannot be revealed to the enemy. Media outlets always face this dilemma in times of war, as part of their readership may buy into this message, and therefore, the New York Times has been forced to educate its readers.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has opened a rift in his own party with the adoption of the principle of "national priority", an emblem of the far-right Le Penist movement that has been spreading across the rest of Europe, but which the PP had never embraced. What's more, it had vehemently rejected it.

We now know that Mariano Rajoy's great secret, the masterful formula that explains such a long political career, has consisted of never getting bogged down in details. If we are to believe his account to the judge, a Minister of the Interior, a head of government, or a party leader knows almost nothing about what goes on below him. "I was not aware of the reserved funds for a second of my life when I was Minister of the Interior," he stated. And this is despite the fact that one of his predecessors, José Luis Corcuera, was tried (and acquitted) for fraudulent use of these funds. But the point is that with this formula he has been able to surf through all the scandals that have affected the PP while he was one of the main, or the main, leader. He never knew anything because he wants us to believe that he only dealt with the great matters of state, with high politics.

The Valencian publishing house Tirant lo Blanch, aimed at the university public, has a very interesting collection that mixes two seemingly distant concepts such as cinema and law. The idea is apparently simple, but very effective in engaging readers who are looking for a more enjoyable way to approach issues that can be dry. The key is to find a legal expert who wants to get involved. Many have done so so far, and thus we find, for example, the criminal lawyer Jordi Nieva discussing democratic institutions based on John Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The latest acquisition of the publishing house has been Joan Ridao, Professor of Constitutional Law at the UB and lawyer in the Parliament (and a former leader of ERC), who tackles one of his specialties, the regulation of lobbyists, based on the film Miss Sloane (2016), directed by John Madden and starring Jessica Chastain.

Pedro Sánchez applies Johan Cruyff's football maxim to politics, which went something like "If we have the ball, they can't score any goals." Or, with a slight variation, "if you have the ball, you don't need to defend, because there's only one ball." Therefore, the point is to have the ball, meaning to set the terms of the debate. In this regard, the extraordinary regularization of immigrants is an impactful measure, the first in 20 years, and it goes to the heart of the debates currently shaking the Western world. Impossible to ignore.