We have teachers on strike – and this weekend they are demonstrating – but there is another group (and you will understand me if I say it is quieter) that is also doing so: librarians. In principle, the strike was only in Barcelona, but it has spread throughout Catalonia. They denounce the lack of labor recognition and the consequences of the new agreement.

Today marks seven years since the trial at the Supreme Court against the main leaders responsible for organizing the October 1st referendum concluded. That judicial case, which culminated in severe sentences for sedition, embezzlement, and disobedience, marked a before and after in Catalan and Spanish politics. Also these days, as a result of the PSOE's arithmetic needs and the demands of the independence parties, it has been two years since the approval of the amnesty law, which, although it was approved with an absolute majority in the Congress of Deputies and has the backing of the Constitutional Court, a part of its recipients continue to wait for it to be applied to them, when it is a fully valid law.The debate on the amnesty was intense. For months it was discussed whether it was convenient, timely, and fair. Its constitutionality was questioned and appeals were filed to try to prevent its entry into force. All this could be considered part of the legitimate democratic game. But once Congress approved the law and the Constitutional Court validated its essential aspects, any discussion about its legal legitimacy should have been resolved, but the Supreme Court has maintained the challenge by not applying the law, stretching the gum of embezzlement to the point of maintaining that there was personal enrichment, even though everyone knows that there was no appropriation of public resources, nor personal enrichment, nor any individual economic benefit.Two years after the amnesty law, Carles Puigdemont, Oriol Junqueras, Raül Romeva, Dolors Bassa, Jordi Turull, Lluís Puig and Toni Comín continue without fully recognizing the effects of the norm. In the case of the exiles, who have not even been tried or convicted, the Supreme Court has already ruled out applying the amnesty to them. In the case of the leaders who were convicted, the same court has opted to indefinitely postpone the decision with the argument that it is necessary to await the ruling, which has been pending for months, from the European instances on the preliminary questions raised. And in this way, days pass, years push.The criminal chamber of the Supreme Court and a good part of the elites of the judiciary have not digested that the sentence of the Procés trial may end up as a dead letter. They experience it as an institutional humiliation and have already made it clear that they will twist the interpretation of the amnesty law until it says the opposite of what is written. Their interpretation is so forced that even some female magistrate made a dissenting separate opinion openly asking for the law to be applied.  The original sin of the amnesty is that it renders meaningless a ruling that had been presented as the State's definitive response to the independence challenge, and the legislator's decision alters that narrative and opens a new political stage that some do not seem willing to accept. The consequence of this is worrying because the Supreme Court acts as a counter-power, as if it had the capacity to decide which laws deserve to be applied and which can be subjected to permanent reinterpretation until they are rendered inoperative. This is an attitude that exceeds the proper functions of the judiciary and erodes one of the basic foundations of any democracy: respect for the will expressed by the citizens' representatives.When a court stops applying a law because it does not agree with its effects, the problem is no longer legal but political. The insistence that Puigdemont cannot return from exile without going to prison and that Junqueras and the rest of the leaders remain disqualified makes it very clear that part of the judiciary prioritizes its ideology over its duty to apply the laws. Blocking the amnesty with unfounded pretexts is, frankly, a manifestation of authoritarianism incompatible with the elementary rules of the rule of law.But as serious as this is the silence of many political leaders. Too many leaders seem comfortable with a situation where laws are only enforceable when they align with their ideological preferences. When the rule of law is a tool to pursue adversaries and not a guarantee to protect rights, it is a cardboard rule of law. And this is an anomaly that transcends separatism. Because when a democracy allows its courts to disobey the spirit and purpose of a law approved by the parliamentary chamber and validated by the Constitutional Court, the damage is not only to those affected. The damage is to democracy itself.

The first thing to say about the evening when the Pope blessed the tallest tower of the Sagrada Família is that we witnessed a moment for the history of the city and the country, because Gaudí's figure was recognized with a creative spectacularity (Igor Cortadellas) that was up to the monument and because the television broadcast (TV3, Paulí Subirà) was also up to the professional passion of the architect of God.

Changes are difficult, and that's why we often resist them. Because even when something doesn't thrill us, we think that what will replace it will please us even less. Sometimes we apply the "known crazy" beyond people and leave the "wise to be known" for others. We don't want to know anything about it because we don't want to change anything. This happens a lot with urban changes, and since this country has been historically destroyed by making a mess of the landscape, both on the coast and inland, many of us tend to view proposed changes with suspicion. And if we are more or less fair people, we recognize the successes, which, apart from aesthetics, also have to do with how they personally affect us in our daily lives. Because, ultimately, and despite tourism, a city must be designed for its citizens to live in.

Sunday, June 14, Swiss citizens will vote on one of the most controversial initiatives in recent years: the so-called “Initiative for Sustainability”, known as the “No to a Switzerland of 10 Million” initiative. Driven by the Swiss People's Party (UDC/SVP), the main national-conservative right-wing party, the proposal aims to prevent the permanent resident population from exceeding ten million inhabitants before the year 2050. If the population reaches 9.5 million, the federal government would have to adopt restrictions on migration and, if these were insufficient, renegotiate existing international agreements that favor demographic growth, including the free movement of people agreement with the European Union. Since this agreement came into force in 2002, the Swiss population has grown from 7.3 million to over 9.1 million. Today, more than 27% of residents are foreigners —one of the highest proportions in Europe—, mostly from EU countries.

The day after the respective parliamentary groups applauded with Christian fervor (of false saints, of whitewashed tombs) in Congress the words of Leo XIV against xenophobia and national priority, the PP and Vox invested the new president of Castilla y León with a government agreement based mainly on this concept. It is hypocritical and contrary to the spirit and letter of everything they claim to defend, from the Constitution to the Charter of Human Rights, but it was completely predictable that it would be so. Castilla y León would not be an exception to what has already happened in Extremadura and Aragon, nor to what will most likely also happen in Andalusia. In fact, in the communities that have not had elections this past winter but are also governed by agreements or pacts between the PP and Vox, national priority has also been incorporated into the roadmap as an indispensable condition for maintaining governments. The scheme is always the same: Vox imposes a blockade on the PP and does not lift it until the PP signs a long document in which it commits to applying Vox's demands in its government action. Since Vox is a completely vertical and hierarchical party, it always does things the same way everywhere, so it is absolutely predictable.The first of these demands is the famous national priority, which conceptually implies the institutionalization of racism and xenophobia, and in practice means a severe cutback in immigrants' access to public services. It is, incidentally, exactly the same recipe proposed by Aliança Catalana in Catalonia, and it is also the characteristic “Theirs first” of fascist populism. It rhymes well with the European Union's migratory policy, which, as the Advocate General of the ECJ has just certified, exports immigrants to prisons in non-EU countries without any guarantees regarding their fundamental rights. Without euphemisms: so that they can be tortured and killed in these other countries, in exchange for receiving the corresponding stipend.Returning to the national priority of Vox and the PP, what many of their supporters do not know is that the cuts in public services and rights that they applaud being applied to immigrants will tomorrow also be applied against them. Hearing Mañueco (the president of Castilla y León is called this, and he repeats in office) stammer vague excuses to downplay the agreement is a sad warning of the justifications that his voters will have to seek when they realize – if they realize – that at the bottom of it all is the dismantling of the welfare state, first, and of democracy itself later, or simultaneously. All this, seasoned with defiant bad-taste fireworks: the president of Extremadura, María Guardiola, who a couple of years ago stated that governing with Vox was her red line, now puts the resources and strength to create a piece of garbage called Extremestiza, to exalt with public money the figures of the Extremaduran plunderers of Latin America, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. And what is worse, with Nacho Cano as musical advisor.

The choice of Catalan by the Pope on his visit to Montserrat is a very important gesture because of its "logic". In the monastery, there were groups of fervent people who made themselves heard a lot. The "jóvenes del Papa", who rhymed "León" with "mola mogollón" or the gentleman who shouted "¡Viva el Papa y viva la virgen!". Alongside this, the parishioner who tried a local "Visca sa santedat el Papa!", had a lot of merit, because Catalans – they know it urbi et orbi– are not so expansive.

This country has extraordinary strength. I feel it as I solemnly watch Pope Leo XIV advance down the main nave of the Sagrada Familia, whose cross he will bless shortly before the cameras that will send the signal to all corners of the world.

One of the moral characteristics of the political and social times we live in Catalonia, and perhaps throughout the world, is the triumph of condescension. It is the weapon that explains the current and effective demobilization of the independence movement, as well as accounting for the lack of reaction to the most serious forms of social and economic exploitation. The strategy of condescension, well described by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, consists of the powerful symbolically and temporarily renouncing their dominant position, simulating a fleeting closeness in their relationship with the dominated subject. With this brief gesture, the powerful achieve that the subordinate docilely and gratefully recognizes their subordinate position. And it is that only those who hold power can be condescending — to put it plainly, it is they who can spare your life — and, in a textbook case of symbolic denial of their position (Jean Baudrillard), they paradoxically achieve recognition of their strength. Who does not remember the symbolic effectiveness of the case of that "campechano" king to make himself admired?

With what moral authority does one of the former heads of the PAU, the University Entrance Exams, which have become the main stupidity of the educational system, write an article like this? An initial clarification, however, regarding the functions they have:1) Arrange in a single line all students who have completed their baccalaureate studies or equivalent and who aspire to university studies.2) Ensure that pre-university centers that have taken care of these students (in general, high schools, subsidized centers, and private centers offering baccalaureate studies or cycles equivalent to the baccalaureate) reasonably evaluate their students.Regarding the first function, it is a clear and evident reality. The entirety of the candidates are placed on a single list and the places are assigned to the university centers. But it must also be clarified that the baccalaureate grade obtained by students in their school is the determining factor for the final qualification. Part of the dishonor of the PAU (University Entrance Exam) issue is the ex post invention of adding certain optional baccalaureate subjects to the access grade, placed without a true academic discussion with different values depending on the studies the students aspire to. Thus, for the universities of Madrid, for example, Humanities subjects weigh for Psychology; for Catalan ones, they do not. Let us remember that the sophistication of epicycles kept the Sun revolving around the Earth for a number of centuries, as Ptolemy would have wanted and as the Pope effectively preferred.Regarding the second function (equalizing criteria for grades), I would not discuss it if it were truly considered. But, either it is esoteric information that perhaps the Generalitat keeps, or simply no one takes it into account. However, my opinion is that increasing its weight is the key to a simple alternative to the PAU method.

Call me resentful, but there are grievances that have stuck in my memory and haven't left me even after years. With the arrival of June, the light of the lengthening days, swallows crossing the sky, and the exaltation of the beginning heat, I can't help but remember that end of the 8th grade school year. The summer camp had been in preparation for months, more important than any that had happened before because it would mark the end of this very significant stage of our lives, the end of primary education and, to some extent, childhood. It had been an effervescent school year, I had learned, thought, and felt more than ever, and I was convinced that anything was possible. One of the problems with summer camp for families was always the cost, but at our school they knew this very well and, since before Christmas, they launched initiatives to help us finance it. One of them was selling lottery tickets. I didn't know yet if they would let me go that year or not, but I wanted to go so badly that I thought if I worked hard to cover the cost, I would eventually achieve it. Surely my tutor and the school principal would convince my father to let me participate in such an extraordinary activity that filled me with immense excitement, as if it were a trip to the Moon. So, I spent my Christmas holidays in the center of Vic stopping passersby with that plain accent I had back then, saying: "Would you like a lottery ticket?" I remember myself like this and I find it hard to believe that I overcame my shyness and dared to speak to strangers as if it were nothing. I soon discovered that I had a great knack for this new activity. I sold everything that could be sold, and I covered the expenses for my summer camp and for others. And yes, I was absolutely sure that with that effort, He (as we called him at home) wouldn't say no to me. I spent the day imagining what it would be like, how much fun I would have, and also that I would be near the boy I liked, of course. I was 14 or 15 years old. I would leave the neighborhood, breathe a completely different air.

“You can connect to Movistar Papa2, Movistar Papa3, or Montserrat Wifi,” a journalist from Regió 7 explains to me. It’s almost eleven, all the faithful who have managed to get a spot, after the paperwork, to see the Pope in Montserrat have been in their assigned places for hours. Cordoned off – if you’ll forgive the rough word that has been used, all these days of paperwork – by fences in different areas. We, the reporters, are in a press room, in the majordomo’s building, with an imposing balcony overlooking the square, with the mountain in the background. Impossible to maintain atheism here.

A few days ago, Floren Aoiz was in Palma, a Navarrese abertzale activist with a long trajectory, currently responsible for the area of political relations with the State of EH Bildu. Invited by the Darder Mascaró Foundations and the La Col·lectiva association, he granted an interview with Anna Mascaró, from Ara Balears, in which he said very interesting things. For example: “In Euskal Herria there is a greater tendency towards sovereignty among Basque speakers (...) but there are also many non-Basque speaking sovereigntists. In recent years, more: it is a growth linked to the perception that sovereignty offers an alternative for society as a whole. An alternative not only of the left, but also linked to society's ability to govern itself. To understand self-government in a certain direction, which is the defense of public services, the defense of better living and working conditions... A model of coexistence. In the case of Euskal Herria, the aspiration for sovereignty means that we want to obtain this sovereignty with respect to the Spanish and French states. But in the world we live in, it is also a demand for democratic sovereignty against capital, against international capital flows and decisions in which peoples have very little say”.It is so. Nine, ten years ago, when Catalan sovereignism was able to propose a true alternative, that is to say: a Republic based precisely on coexistence, equal opportunities (this implies the defense of public services and good living and working conditions), it had an absolute majority in Parliament, it confronted the Spanish state and obtained —briefly, but it obtained it— world attention. Many saw it as a threat to the established order, but this was precisely the greatness of the proposal and what made, in the eyes of many others, the Catalan Republic not seem like a threat, but rather a hope. The old order was what the Spanish state represented; the Catalan Republic represented —it promised— a step forward in rights and freedoms, a new 21st-century Republic, progressive, advanced, mature, capable of including citizens rooted in the past and those who have just arrived. A country founded on the Catalan language and culture, in dialogue with the languages and cultures of the world.Political defeat led to another self-inflicted defeat. A tortured abandonment in internal hemorrhages, psychodramas, obsessive searches for culprits, and idealizations of pasts supposedly better than they ever existed as invoked. Withdrawal, conservatism, and ultra-conservatism: the attitudes of the fearful and the opportunists who believe their moment has come to command something, even if it's just scraps. There are those who still insist on denying the existence of a Catalan far-right, even when it's right in front of them, and those who consider a poll sums to an "independentist majority" with the seats of Junts and ERC plus those of Aliança Catalana. This is indeed the direct path to definitive failure.

The streets are full of "The dignity of education", written on huge banners. This is what the demonstrations and teachers' strikes are demanding. The resounding no to the agreement reached by the union representatives, with the loud booing of the representative to tell her "We are the ones who are in the classroom" and "It was not a matter of salary", reveals to us the moment we are in. No, it wasn't about working conditions alone, because what teachers want is to be able to exercise their profession properly. They have said it very clearly: well-being is not solely a matter of working conditions; what is being claimed is to exercise the profession with dignity.The teacher unrest is now compounded by a fracture in union representation. Who represents the teachers? Jordi Muñoz's analysis is very accurate regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile. Jordi Muñoz's analysis regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile.

This weekend I read Por qué soy marxista y otras confesiones, by Alfons Carles Comín (1933-1980), which Laia publishing house published exactly 47 years ago, in June 1979 (in reality it is a collection of articles, some of which had been published several years earlier). To better adapt to the ideological fashion of that time, the title is misleading. In reality, it should have been called Por qué soy cristiano-marxista, as it literally appears in the first sentence of Comín's essay; the year '79, however, would have been quite problematic: fashions, all of them, generate their corresponding antibodies. Although it is unfindable, I recommend this book. It formulates one of the most nuanced and historically informed approaches to the relationship between Christianity and Marxism in late Francoist Catalonia, and in the European context of the post-Vatican II Council. It should be said that other authors of the same period were neither so well informed nor so nuanced. Comín's approach is born of a double commitment: to the workers' tradition and to Christianity lived as a radical ethical demand. This perspective allows him to read Marxism not as a substitution of faith, but as a historical hermeneutics capable of revealing the structures of oppression that Christianity, in its institutional version, had often ignored or even legitimized. Comín did not precisely come from a working-class family, let alone a Marxist one, but he was Catholic. On page 22 he states that Catalonia has suffered ""an attempt at authentic ethnic genocide". No small matter.

Miriam Nogueras, from Junts, took advantage of the greeting, as a politician, to the Pope, to urge him to use Catalan in the events at the Sagrada Família. Then, Gabriel Rufián, from Esquerra, sent a tweet, in Spanish, which said: “Turra is coming. An absolutely bland and content-free event will fill the digital media and Catalan media circuit for days. Trivial but effective nationalism. Then to vote with PP and Vox, of course. Pure convergent mental hijacking”. And here comes the spokesperson for the Popular Party in Parliament, Juan Fernández, “has attacked the independence movement for demanding that the pontiff defend Catalan and has blamed it for the «failure of linguistic policies»" (the independence movement, not the Pope, poor man).

1. We are completing the transition from industrial capitalism to digital and financial capitalism. And everything – work, democracy, any structural element – must be read from this perspective, if we do not want to be left with melancholy.

With that gift of opportunity that has always characterized him, Adif has made an offering to the Holy Father of a gift that allows him to grasp the reality of Catalan land as soon as he steps off the plane. Exactly at the same time that Leo XIV was landing at El Prat airport, an incident at Adif's Traffic Control Center in Barcelona left the entire country without commuter trains: R1, R2, R3, R4, R8, R11, R14, R15, R16, R17, RG1, RL3, RL4, RT1, RT2. The service was interrupted for more than half an hour, until it was gradually recovered. And it fell again. Your Holiness, welcome to Catalonia.

With his unusual address to the Congress of Deputies, Leo XIV, or Robert Prevost, personified one of those paradoxes that define our times: that a supposedly infallible religious leader, who even allows himself to speak out against rights as fragile and evidently noble as euthanasia or abortion, can at the same time be a better defender of democracy than many of the elected representatives who applauded him with the same cynicism with which they carry out their lamentable daily work. The current Pope of Rome said valuable words in Congress, he has said them at different times during his trip to the country called Madrid, and it is foreseeable that he will continue to say them during his stay in Barcelona. Furthermore, he has just published an encyclical in which he positions himself on an issue—abuses of power in the age of artificial intelligence—that will literally determine the future of the world: Leo XIV has not wanted to shirk the duty of speaking out on it, and he has done so with a speech that challenges the powerful far-right groups in the West. That in Spain, and in Catalonia, some solemn patriots call him a woke pope, or a sanchista pope or (these days we will hear it) a Spanish nationalist pope also indicates that he is not mistaken. In Madrid, Leo XIV received enthusiastic and uncritical mass adoration, because it is a city accustomed to living under the customs and ways of Spanish nationalism, and this predisposes favorably towards any pontiff, even if he is progressive. In Barcelona he will find more opposition, but not so much—unfortunately—as a result of the city's progressive tradition, but as a consequence of the patriotic and essentialist mess that pollutes the Catalan public debate and which, precisely, advances by leaps and bounds this far-right against which Prevost positions himself.

Armenia wants to continue moving closer to the European Union. Like Moldova almost a year ago, the ideological battle between Moscow and Brussels has marked Sunday's elections in this small country in the South Caucasus and has endorsed the current government of Nikol Pashinyan. The prime minister's party, Civil Contract, has won practically 50% of the votes. The three pro-Russian parties have garnered 37% of the votes and have strengthened their presence in Parliament, led by Armenian Strong, the formation of Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, currently under house arrest for allegedly advocating the overthrow of the government.