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.

The ERC deputy in Congress Francesc-Marc Álvaro presented the book, but it was another republican in Madrid who took the party president's message. "I went to jail for Catalunya, not because Colau is a deputy on an Esquerra list." Oriol Junqueras has cut short the unitary list of the left promoted for weeks by Gabriel Rufián with the collaboration of his former colleague in the lower house, Joan Tardà. In fact, a few days ago Tardà himself suggested in an interview in Público that Colau be number 2 on a list headed by Rufián and that David Fernàndez (CUP) also be in third position.

Alejandro Fernández (Tarragona, 1976) feels strengthened at the helm of the PP of Catalonia and has left behind his differences with Alberto Núñez Feijóo.Can you explain to us what the PP's position is regarding the war in Iran?

When Pedro Sánchez dusted off the slogan “No to war”, he knew perfectly well what he was doing. The confusion it has caused in the PP is such that the best response Feijóo's spin doctors could come up with in Wednesday's session was: “No to war and no to you”.

When the euthanasia law was approved in June 2021, support for the initiative was very broad in Spanish society, which had experienced emblematic cases such as that of Ramon Sampedro (died in 1998), played by Javier Bardem in Alejandro Amenábar's film Mar adentro, or that of Ángel Hernández, the man who helped his wife, María José Carrasco, to die in 2019 and who was acquitted of the crime of aiding suicide once the law came into force. According to a CIS barometer from January 2021, 72% were in favor of the law and only 15% against.

Albert Dalmau (Barcelona, 1990) visits l'ARA after a week in which, despite everything, the Government has saved a match ball and has gained time to approve the budgets.The government yesterday made a gesture quite unprecedented in Catalan political history, which is the withdrawal of the budgets. Is it a tactical withdrawal?

The big news from the elections in Castile and León is that, for the first time in a long time, the expectations predicting a surge for Vox have not materialized. Polls forecasting a drop for the People's Party (PP) and a Vox surge to 19 seats and over 20% of the vote have instead led to a scenario that reinforces the two-party system, with both the PP and the Socialists gaining more seats (+2) than Vox (+1). Therefore, it is legitimate to ask whether the far-right wave is reaching its peak, especially considering that the campaign coincided with Donald Trump's escalating involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. However, two points need to be clarified. Vox's rise hasn't been as significant because it was already starting from a strong position in 2022, when it obtained 17.6% of the vote and 13 seats. The electoral system, especially in a territory with many constituencies, benefits the two major parties and disadvantages third parties, as has been the case. The second point is that, while the far right is not growing as much, the hegemony of the right is consolidating.

Pedro Sánchez usually plays on the attack when he sees a clear opportunity to advance. And the diplomatic clash with Donald Trump's United States represents an unbeatable window of opportunity for him to set the debate on terms that suit him best. There are two major blocs in the world: the militarists/authoritarians (Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, etc.), and the democrats and supporters of the diplomatic path (which he currently leads, at least within the EU). In a country like Spain, with a very significant anti-militarist and anti-American sentiment (a direct legacy of Francoism), and which in 2003 and 2004 mobilized against the Iraq War in a process that would end with the PP's eviction from power, it is playing a winning card.

This week no relevant secrets about the 23-F coup d'état have been revealed, but it has left us with the hilarious phone conversations of Antonio Tejero's wife and a new strategic blunder by Alberto Núñez Feijóo for history. Carmen Díaz Pereira, Tejero's wife, discovered on the night of February 23rd what it feels like to be on the losing side. While half of Spain waits with bated breath to see if they will be rounded up like in 1936, this woman, sensing that the coup was failing, moved heaven and earth to try to get her husband out of the mess he had gotten into for being “a fool” and “an idiot”. “If they've left him like a cigarette butt. For God's sake. It's undignified”, she complains to General Fajardo. It's clear that she considers her husband an idealistic dreamer who has been tricked by some cowardly generals. “So good and so honest. Always with the homeland up, down [...] and all he wants is to end terrorism so that people live comfortably and in peace”, she tells a friend. “Have you seen what a disgusting army?”, she tells another. The friends she speaks to, presumably also military wives, try to encourage her by telling her that her husband is a “hero”, but she is suspicious. She knows, long before her husband does, how it will all end and that he will be a scapegoat. “A wretch” who has been “deceived”. Seen through these conversations, February 23rd becomes a sad Valle-Inclanesque farce. Of course, a farce that could have cost many lives.