The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has entered the debate on the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) and the taxation of labor income with statements that do not fully align with reality. In an interview this Friday on Cadena SER, the popular leader claimed that the Spanish government has made "a good deal" with the minimum wage increases because, according to him, the State collects more money through social security contributions and personal income tax (IRPF).

For days, the Broad Front and Podemos have been blaming each other for the failure of left-wing unity ahead of November 29th. The candidacy led by Ada Colau boasts of having brought together fifteen different parties under its banner, although the four main parties have been the ones leading the way: Comuns, Sumar, Más Madrid, and United Left (IU). Now there will be fourteen, as confirmed by ARA, because one of the two sects that had joined has pulled out of the Broad Front. The Humanist Party, founded in 1984 under the umbrella of the IU—and which left two years later amidst accusations of sectarianism—, has finally rejected the offer after consulting its membership.

“There are owners who are afraid because, if a squatter enters their home, with a paper that proves they have ordered a pizza, no one can kick them out for a few years.” The PP candidate for the general elections, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said this on Wednesday at an event in Seville, where he outlined his party's proposals on housing. According to the conservative leader, a person could prove their residence in a home with what has become popular as "the pizza method".

In the eyes of the majority of the population, the Senate may seem like a representative chamber with little utility in the day-to-day of parliamentary politics. However, the electoral call has shown that it is a contested terrain because it can become a counterweight capable of pressuring or obstructing the action of the Spanish government, just as the People's Party has done from the opposition over the last few years. But, depending on the majorities that emerge from November 29, the right could even aspire to make deeper changes: even to the Constitution.

The former president of the Generalitat Carles Puigdemont confirmed this Thursday in an interview on the program Pla seqüènciaon La 2 Cat that he will not want to assume the position of leader of the opposition in Parliament when he returns to Catalonia. "I could not act as such, but, on the other hand, even if I could, it seems to me that it is not correct for someone who has been president of the Generalitat and has held the presidency, which is an institution, to then have to control the president, whoever it may be," he argued throughout the interview, recorded after the judicial endorsement of the amnesty.

The leadership of Esquerra Republicana has already decided on the traveling companions that Gabriel Rufián will have in the next Spanish elections. The party's executive has shored up Mireia Ingla, Jordi Albert, and Laura Pelay as numbers two, three, and four in the Barcelona constituency, respectively, all three of whom have the utmost confidence of the party president, Oriol Junqueras. "Time proves us right: national candidacies, rooted in the territory, are the ones with the most strength to stop Spanish neo-fascism," asserted the ERC spokesperson, Isaac Albert, in a statement issued by the party this Wednesday.

1. The crux of the transaction between Junts and the PSOE to facilitate Pedro Sánchez's investiture was the amnesty, which finally materialized after much struggle and effort. The agreement unleashed a wave of resentment the likes of which had never been seen in Madrid (we, however, already knew it well enough here). Judges, economic powers, media outlets, and all the mechanisms of the deep state reacted to the offense by orchestrating a major hunt for the Spanish prime minister and his inner circle. Finally, in an ending worthy of a Greek tragedy, Sánchez has ended up struck down by those who had been giving him air for more than three years. What is my assessment of all this? Junts has squandered a truly historic opportunity to assert the country's interests instead of focusing everything on the restitution of grievances for the victims of the 'Procés'. Both causes were legitimate, of course, but priorities had to be chosen. And the facts are stubborn: it is either one thing or the other. With a government on the horizon in which the PP and Vox will have a comfortable majority, we can forget for many years about better financing, the forgiveness of a part of the FLA debt, transparency in fiscal balances, and necessary investments in infrastructure. Nothing at all will remain of it.

If the climatic trend is the same as this summer's, it is likely that we will have a warm autumn, but not hot in the usual journalistic sense. For various reasons, these types of heatwaves are over. A few days ago, a friend of my generation and I were recalling the politically torrid autumns of the Transition and comparing them to the current apathy. We were twelve or thirteen years old, and everything was boiling: factories, universities, neighborhoods, the media. Nothing was certain, however; even the boiling itself was often ambiguous. Exactly half a century ago, in 1976, the dictatorship still existed, but society ignored it as much as it could. Everyone did it in their own way, obviously, but almost no one trusted the viability of that rickety artifact, which, in appearance, was already outdated. Fifty years later, this is perhaps the fundamental key to understanding that period: Franco's death had left a void that the Arias Navarro government did not know how to fill in any way. The kleptocracy remained intact, parties were still prohibited, strikes were illegal, and the police were handing out beatings right and left. Strengthened by years of clandestine struggle, the labor movement turned 1976 into a year of great labor conflict. Without wanting to idealize anything, it is true that there were massive assemblies in the factories, that neighborhood committees articulated social demands, that the university was already out of control de facto... The feeling was that society was moving faster than the government. In any case, the memory of the Vitoria massacre on March 3, with five workers dead, loomed over any protest. The so-called Platajunta, which brought together the main opposition forces, achieved unprecedented political coordination and turned social pressure into a real negotiating force. Viewed with fifty years of perspective, however, that somewhat forced unity led to the pact of forgetting. It began to take shape right then, and it contained several political time bombs that would eventually explode decades later. To confirm this with a simple brushstroke: the founder of the party that very soon may govern Spain hand in hand with Vox, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, was the Minister of the Interior on that fateful March 3...

The public management of a government is always a compromise between the exercise of established administrative functions and the innovations driven by politics. Correspondingly, we have civil servants, more focused on ensuring the former, and political personnel, more focused on the latter. Management will be good if the fit between the motivations and temperaments of both groups is good, and if the level of competence of each is high. Ideally, the natural conservatism of the civil servant will be tempered by the drive of political personnel, and vice versa. Note: the contrast of the competent civil servant and the incompetent politician is a caricature. There are all sorts in both groups.

The PSPV-PSOE denounces that the Council of the People's Party and Pérez Llorca has once again increased the price of public protected housing and is setting it at prices that make it increasingly inaccessible for Valencian families, young people, and the middle classes.

After the World Cup hangover, can we, Catalans, draw any useful lessons from this happy outcome in the most important sporting competition on the planet?Spain's victory has pleased me. Nine Catalan players and eight from Barça would be reason enough to support the national team. But the main reason is another: a way of understanding competition has prevailed that also applies to politics.It has been said that the red team won because it was, above all, a team. Faced with teams full of stars – Brazil, England, Portugal or France – Spain did not depend on a single name. Its strength has not been isolated talent, but cohesion. The whole has weighed more than the sum of its parts.It is true. But it is not enough to be a pineapple. It is not enough to have a locker room, nor to invoke great words, nor to confuse intensity with intelligence.Besides a team, to win you need something more prosaic and more decisive: a plan.

This June, the People's Party of Catalonia has experienced a calm regional congress that has re-elected Tarragona's Alejandro Fernández as president for another four years. The history of the Catalan popular party has been a Dragon Khan since its foundation in the late eighties, and the president's chair burns out tenant after tenant. Fernández has been in office for eight years now, surpassing the average tenure of the long list of predecessors – the most recent being Daniel Sirera, Alicia Sánchez Camacho, and Xavier García Albiol – and if he completes his term, twelve years will become almost an eternity in the temporal parameters of the Catalan conservatives.

There is a magnificent football quote from Jean-Paul Sartre that condenses the essence of the Trumpist manual: “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” Donald Trump has based his political career on an identical premise: in the United States, everything is complicated by the presence of opponents.

Junts' proposal that Pedro Sánchez resign and explore an alternative to the presidency of the Spanish government, preferably from an independent candidate, has been the focus of part of the debate in Madrid this week. The initiative has an eminently "strategic" reading, according to Junts sources, although the rest of the actors do not see it as viable and some dismiss it as a "stunt". The party calls it the "Starmer way", alluding to the resignation this week of the British Prime Minister. But what does Junts actually seek with this proposal, considering that the PSOE completely dismisses it?

Nevenka Fernández, twenty-five years later, has returned to Ponferrada to close a circle. If in 2001 she disappeared from this Leonese city, a victim of a smear campaign, despite having managed to get justice to condemn the town's mayor, the popular Ismael Álvarez, for sexual harassment, this Saturday Fernández returned accompanied by Minister Sara Aagesen as a star participant in a conference on reparation and memory. "I am very nervous, but very happy," she said, emotional to thank the strong ovation with which the auditorium received her.

This was one of the worst weeks for Pedro Sánchez in the legislature: there was the statement of his wife, Begoña Gómez, before Judge Peinado, and also the statement as a defendant of former president José Luis Rodríguez, the intellectual architect of the plurinational majority. However, after all, at Moncloa they consider that they have survived and are vowing to hold on until 2027. Now, from next year onwards, different scenarios open up for calling elections, and he himself admitted it this Friday at the press conference after the European Council. "We will present budgets during 2026 and there will be elections in 2027. There will be no elections jointly with municipal and regional elections. And I can't say more," he said, in response to journalists' questions. "Reality is very changeable," he admitted, implying that he could call early elections, since until now he had assured that he would serve out the legislature. This Friday he limited himself to saying the following: "My ambition is that legislatures, when the right is not in power, also last four years." This translates into three different scenarios:

Pope Leo XIV concluded his apostolic journey to the Spanish state this Friday, leaving behind many political messages. The head of the Catholic Church, with more than 1.4 billion faithful worldwide according to data from the Holy See, has been increasing his geopolitical impact for months. What has he emphasized in this week's 22 interventions?

Faced with the crisis that looms heavily over the PSOE due to the Zapatero case, the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has reiterated his support for the socialist ex-president, who is being investigated for alleged crimes of criminal organization, influence peddling, and document forgery. On the day that the Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard entered the party headquarters on Ferraz Street in Madrid, Sánchez assured from Rome that he has read the judge's order and has been informed of the summary through the media and that he "reaffirms" his opinion: "Full cooperation with justice, full respect for the presumption of innocence, and all my support for President Zapatero. There is no reason to change this position.

The mayor of Tremp has worked for thirty years as a Catalan teacher. She began in municipal politics in 2007 and, when she became a deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia last term, she requested a compulsory leave of absence which she extended after the 2024 elections, when she was appointed delegate of the Generalitat in Alt Pirineu i Aran.

Reality insists on changing the plans of novelist Richard Ford (Jackson, 1944). If a couple of years ago, coinciding with the publication of the fifth and last book starring Frank Bascombe, Be mine (2023; Sé mía in the Spanish translation published by Anagrama), he hinted that he was giving up writing, he is in Barcelona presenting a new work, How I got on (2026; En palabras sencillas in Spanish by Feltrinelli), an essay of about a hundred pages that starts with a stimulating question: how can we live decently in a world where politics tends to be dishonest?