The approval of a regional government's annual budget should be addressed as a priority, separate from other political demands that fall under different institutional purviews. When public accounts are extended, the administration loses the capacity to update programs, adjust budget items to meet new needs, and implement more ambitious public policies. In particular, increasing social spending—in areas such as healthcare, education, and support for vulnerable groups—requires a current and fully operational budgetary framework. Conditioning the approval of this budget on demands whose fulfillment primarily falls to the central government introduces a deadlock that ultimately affects citizens directly, who see policies that are indeed within the regional government's jurisdiction delayed or limited.

The pacifist movement has been nonexistent for years, neither in Catalonia, nor in Spain, nor in Europe. There are people who are pacifists or who call themselves pacifists, but each in their own way. Wanting peace, in the abstract or in general terms, is a moral stance, not a political program. It has to do with values, with empathy for those who suffer violence, and with the will to change violent structures. From there, there may be organizations that work in this direction, conducting research, denouncing injustices, and sometimes proposing solutions. There is a type of pacifist who is not naive, who usually doesn't even label themselves as such. They simply work: they participate or collaborate in some way in negotiations with armed groups or in contexts of political violence; they make proposals before a war breaks out; with inclusive criteria, they help negotiators when they are in crisis, they thoroughly study the situation and look for alternatives; they appear before parliamentary defense committees with proposals to demilitarize defense policies; They network with other people and study groups to develop new approaches that will be useful in the future, in the post-conflict era; they talk to people on "the other side" to find points of consensus; they give lectures to arms companies in crisis, proposing ways to transform them into companies that produce things of social utility, not weapons of death; they watch the speeches of the world's most important leaders, such as Trump and Putin, daily to see how they think, understand their underlying culture, and see if they make any proposals that can be adapted and improved; they design roadmaps for exiting conflict; they talk to the actors involved, even if their hands are stained with blood; they get their boots dirty treading on muddy ground; they conduct discourse analysis to see if there are any advances in the thinking of people who believe in violence as a means; they are alert to ideologies that normalize the discourse of violence; they create counter-narratives to the fear-mongering discourses created by those who profit from the arms trade; They practice citizen or parallel diplomacy (with governments or institutions), and, above all, they make proposal after proposal, even though no one listens. I could make a four-page list of things that can be done and are being done.

Although it's the Christmas holidays and it seems like everyone should be happy, the latest CIS poll It says that the main concern of Spaniards for the next ten years is war, above unemployment or climate change. A quarter of the surveyed population said this, but it doesn't explain the reasons for this fear. 3.5% are concerned about international tensions, economic conflicts, the power of China, ideological radicalization, and totalitarian regimes, but this percentage is too small to interpret the first question.

At the last meeting of NATO defense ministers, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said two things worth mentioning. One, and he stated this bluntly, was to reiterate to European countries that they must increase military budgets to 5% of GDP, and that this increase must be achieved by purchasing weapons in the United States, something Trump had said a few times, but which he now insists on in case we weren't clear enough about. In other words, the rearmament of Europe is not justified by alleged military threats to the continent, even though the NATO Secretary General has said several times that Russia could invade us within five years, but rather by the needs of the US military economy, making the slogan of "America first", which in this case means investing our budgets in the United States. Business is business, and the world's new CEO, Donald Trump, wants it that way. What I regret, in this case, is that so many European countries are doing the emperor's bidding, and are willing to sink what little remains of the welfare state in Europe. Consequently, reduce social spending.

President Trump is pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the Gaza war, among other reasons because he is convinced he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. He boasted of having ended more than seven armed conflicts around the world and is convinced he can end the Palestinian conflict, "which has lasted 3,000 years." To begin with, if you look at the list Trump himself released of resolved conflicts, you will see that some are still active and others are more like trade and investment agreements from companies friendly to the president, who thinks more in terms of business than peacemaking.

Municipalities, local entities, are the administrative and political areas closest to the people, and it is through these areas that citizens can participate most directly in a variety of issues. Catalan municipalities have long had a tradition of twinning with other cities, whether in Catalonia, Spain, Europe, or southern European countries. In the latter cases, it involves establishing cooperation programs in various areas; it depends on the size of the municipality and the budget it can allocate. It's a very interesting experience because it allows for establishing links with cities in impoverished areas, at war, or in political transition, which always need external support.

So far this century, there have been 49 wars worldwide, 30% of which have ended with a peace agreement, 38% are still active, and 14.3% have resulted in military victory for one of the parties. The remaining wars are deactivated but not yet resolved. For decades, the tendency has been to resolve armed conflicts through negotiation and the signing of a peace agreement, something that has always satisfied me. But in recent years, the trend has changed, with wars that end with victory for one side and defeat for the other beginning to proliferate. This is a worrying trend, especially at a time when global military spending and the arms trade have increased dramatically, and militaristic thinking is once again prevalent, in a new Cold War dominated by the paranoia of being attacked.

If there is one thing that makes your hair stand on end, it is the constant images of children dying of hunger in Gaza, at the express wish of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors, with the complicit silence of the majority of the Israeli population, totally uninformed, and Germany's incomprehensible position of not condemning this savagery, due to its guilty conscience about the Holocaust. A disgrace for the whole of Europe, in which it must be acknowledged that the Spanish government has stood up from the very beginning.

Behind many violent conflicts lurk sinister figures who exercise perverse and harmful leadership, capable of swaying large masses or smaller but loyal groups willing to kill under their command. After all, they are the ones who have the power to legitimize violence and make it acceptable and necessary, sometimes providing exclusionary and confrontational ideologies and symbols that are easily accepted by their followers, who develop emotional ties with their beloved leaders in a system of unthinking allegiance and obedience. These types of leaders are experts at channeling the emotions of others to their own interests. There is a close relationship between episodes of group hatred or collective violence and dominant and autocratic leadership, which are accompanied by social attitudes of loyalty, obedience, submission, or subordination, which may be voluntary and by seduction, not by coercion. Leaders simply activate, stimulate, and channel these more or less latent predispositions and provide them with a justifying narrative. They are what some also call "ethnic entrepreneurs," the instigators of war who, like Netanyahu and his supremacist minister Ben-Gvir, use hate speech to stigmatize and "animalize" their adversaries, in this case, the Palestinians.

We've all seen the constant images of thousands of people in Gaza queuing, or fighting, to get some food, as well as of the emaciated children and the first deaths from starvation, nearly a hundred, in an episode of hunger rarely seen in recent decades. And all because of Israel's decision to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, with the aim of killing or displacing the entire population of Gaza in a textbook ethnic cleansing. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, restricting the entry of food, forcing ovens to close due to lack of fuel, and practicing hunger—that is, deliberately provoking hunger—as a weapon of war and as political punishment for the entire Palestinian population, not Hamas.

I don't think we can simply return to the past after what happened in Ukraine, but I do believe that what is being decided now in most European countries, the European Union, and NATO will further distance us from Russia, which has officially become the new and only enemy to be feared and defended against as much as possible.

The situation is really unusual, although predictable. Autocrats tend to understand each other, and Trump and Putin are. Trump's contempt for Europe and Ukraine, leaving them out of negotiations with Russia, should not surprise us so much, since Trump is not a politician guided by intelligence (what little he has is infantilized), but by what he considers his particular interests, which he extrapolates to them, turning them into "homeland". His peace plan is to leave things as they are, that is, to let Russia keep the conquered territory, and Ukraine without part of what was its state territory.

In 1988, 34 years ago, the United Nations initiated steps which, in 1991, led to a cease-fire and the deployment of a United Nations mission (MINURSO) in Western Sahara, whose R refers precisely to the promised referendum which has never materialized. Since 1991, moreover, Morocco has encouraged the colonisation of the Sahara in order to Moroccanize it, an old practice the world over to change the identity or ethnic composition of occupied territories, so that, over the years (now 47), time runs in Morocco's favour, both demographically and politically.