The Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), a liberal political group and member of the outgoing government coalition, has been proclaimed the winner of the legislative elections in Morocco. These have been marked by an overwhelming abstention rate of 61.9%, the highest in twenty years, according to provisional data from the Moroccan Interior Ministry. Inevitably, the crisis in Ceuta has also marked the agenda of an election with a predictable result.

Still in shock from the far-right victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, Germany is taking the temperature of the ultra-wave this Sunday in the elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and also in Berlin. The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is looking to leverage the momentum of the victory in Saxony-Anhalt to try and repeat it in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the second eastern state to head to the polls. And it could succeed, although far from an absolute majority and with few options to govern. Polls give the AfD 37% of the votes, followed very closely by the Social Democrats, currently in government, with 35%.

It had been three years since Vladimir Putin kissed children in public, a symptom that his popularity is wavering. The poor polls for his party, United Russia, have forced him to get involved in the campaign for the Russian legislative elections, which are being held between this Friday and Sunday. They are the first in wartime and the first in which the inhabitants of the occupied Ukrainian territories are participating, who have already begun to vote in ballot boxes guarded by armed soldiers. These are elections manipulated by the Kremlin, with the pacifist opposition banned, where the overwhelming victory of the ruling party is taken for granted and which, in a context of social unrest due to economic problems, internet blocks, and conflict fatigue, the authorities hope will pass without much notice or surprise.

As it could not be otherwise, the illiberal wave sweeping the world has set its sights on the right to vote. Voting with freedom of conscience is surely the most relevant civic act, the most transcendent right that a citizen can exercise. Ballot boxes identify democracies, even though authoritarian regimes falsify them to disguise themselves as democracies: Putin's Russia, for example. But the vote, and specifically the manipulation of the vote for one's own electoral benefit, is the dark object of desire for authoritarian politicians and rulers. They usually accuse others of engaging in it, because when they are in power they indulge in it gluttonously.The temptation to tamper with votes is sharpening. In Argentina, Milei has promoted an electoral reform that, if it goes ahead, will completely redesign the rules of the democratic game from top to bottom. Among other things, the chainsaw man proposes that electoral campaigns not be paid for by the state, but rather sponsored by individuals and companies, and he also wants to eliminate presidential debates and even the mandatory primaries within parties.Trump has turned manipulations regarding the vote into a raison d'être for his policies, starting with the fact of having instigated the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a supposed rebellion against no less supposed fraudulent elections (which he had lost and Biden had won). Trump has likewise fueled the suspicion of fraud regarding the midterm elections in the month of November (and he will intensify it as they approach, because he fears losing them), and a few days ago, at a convention in Dallas, in the middle of an erratic and decadent speech, he wanted to cast a lure: five thousand dollars for every adult American citizen in the event that the Republicans win the elections. A promise like this is indecent, illegal, and obviously unachievable, but the shot has already been fired: it is about putting a price on the vote and treating it as just another commodity.In the Spanish state, the Supreme Court has just provisionally halted the so-called “law of grandchildren” to prevent the voting rights of the descendants of Spanish citizens who had to go into exile during the Franco dictatorship. This is equivalent to taking the right to vote away from more than four hundred thousand Spanish citizens, with the argument –wielded by the high court without any attempt to hide it– that their participation in the elections could “alter the result desired by the Spaniards” in the polls. The “desired result,” in case anyone has lost track, is for the sum of PP and Vox to win the elections. Since we mention it, Santiago Abascal's party has proposed more than once (and broad sectors of the PP view it favorably) to modify the electoral law so that “minorities” cannot run in elections as they have done until now, nor “impose their will” in Congress or the Senate. This, in case anyone has lost track as well, is aimed at the left-wing parties, and also at the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties.

A charismatic 35-year-old man travels through the towns of a German state aboard a blue 1975 Simson, the legendary motorcycle of the former East Germany. At every stop, thousands of followers with his face printed on their t-shirts shout his name and queue up to get a photograph or an autograph before he climbs back onto the bike and resumes his journey. What might seem like a rock star's tour is, in reality, the election campaign of Ulrich Siegmund, the politician who aspires to make Saxony-Anhalt the first German state governed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Adventure books and good meteorologists explain that in the eye of the hurricane there is a certain calm. The eye is the central and calmest region of cyclones, where pressure drops and winds are gentle. It is surrounded by vertical storm towers. More or less like holidays. When the summer period is over, it will start to rain cats and dogs, and the idea that life is a slow, cozy place where ice cream is eaten will be denied. The course promises strong emotions and various hurricane storms.

A little more than two months before the legislative elections, the Supreme Court of the United States has issued an emergency ruling that only promises to add more uncertainty to an election day that is already expected to be critical. The conservative majority has lifted the judicial blockade on an executive order that President Donald Trump had signed in March to restrict mail-in voting. The magistrates, for now, allow the tycoon to continue with his plan while they deliberate whether the executive really has the powers to dictate how Americans vote. Furthermore, the decision comes while there is still another judicial suspension on one of the sections of this same order.

Aliança Catalana is the party that is growing the most in the polls. In the CEO barometer, it is in second position in Parliament and is close to leading the pro-independence bloc. Thousands of potential votes that will have to seek an alternative in the general elections. The party leader, Sílvia Orriols, has committed to incorporating into Aliança Catalana's statutes that they will never run in Spanish elections. Where would these votes go, then?

The PSC would win the parliamentary elections again if they were held today, despite maintaining a downward trend that would take them from the 42 seats obtained in 2024 to a range of between 36 and 38. However, the most relevant image offered by the barometer of the Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (CEO) made public yesterday is the consolidation of Aliança Catalana on the right of the parliamentary spectrum. Sílvia Orriols' party climbs to 23-25 deputies (it currently has 2) and clearly surpasses Junts per Catalunya, its main rival, which would lose half of its support to a range of between 16 and 18 deputies. ERC is the other party that is rising, consolidating the second position already predicted by other polls, up to 24-26 deputies.

Why do legislatures not run their course? The uncertainty of elections weighs heavily, and a good part of executives intend to see things through to the end, but many governments end up going to the polls ahead of time. In the case of European democratic systems, around 40% of elections are held before the end of the term set by current legislation. Therefore, holding elections before they are due is quite common. One might be tempted to think that early elections mainly occur due to negative factors, such as a corruption case, but this would not be the case. When a party governs alone, without a majority in the chamber, and especially when the economy is doing well, calling an election is usually a sure bet that governments use to obtain the desired majority of seats.

Pedro Sánchez is not exactly preparing a "tupinada", but rather designing through "electoral engineering" a plan to win the next state elections thanks to the vote from abroad. This is the thesis defended by the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who this Tuesday wanted to place the Popular Party one step below Vox in the accusations of future electoral fraud that both parties have been fueling for some time. Feijóo, who was interviewed by the media outlet La7 Región de Murcia, thus specified his words on Monday on esRadio, where he openly criticized that the so-called "law of the clean" – a provision included in the law of democratic memory – is designed to alter the electoral roll in favor of the PSOE.

With the continuity of Pedro Sánchez's government in the spotlight, the general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, has come out in defense of the president of the Spanish executive: "I believe he will not step down from the presidency, nor do I think he should, he must exhaust all that remains of his term", he stated during his speech at the summer course of the Menéndez Pelayo International University and the Association of Journalists of Economic Information, held this week in Santander.

There are days when a new situation is foreseen, in which even a change of era is sensed. And, from our point of view, this is what happened yesterday in Madrid.  The debate in Congress on Sánchez's explanations went as one might imagine: Sánchez defending himself against the PP with the "you too!" (because, of course, the PP can write encyclopedias about corruption), accusing the justice system of bias and therefore, of lawfare, making a somewhat forced turn, presenting the PSOE as a victim of the corruption of Ábalos and Cerdán, and reducing the crimes to a specific handful of delinquents. And Feijóo saying all sorts of things to him. And Rufián asking for a government plan. And Junts made an unexpected proposal, this one, to tell Sánchez: “we will invest a new socialist president and we will hold elections when the time comes, next year” (a proposal that Sánchez got rid of by inviting Junts to vote for a motion of no confidence from Feijóo, which Junts will not do). This would be an account adjusted to the facts of what we heard yesterday.But there was more, much more. Because, you know what? Feijóo told Sánchez that he will be indicted very soon. And the PP spokesperson in Congress said that there will be people who will start singing, like the corrupter Aldama, who will not go to prison and has saved three million euros in commissions that he will not have to return. In other words, the PP knows what the judges are preparing and what reports the Police and the Civil Guard are preparing. And in the afternoon, Begoña Gómez, Sánchez's wife, had to personally go and hand over her passport to the judge, and Zapatero's entire agenda was leaked.

An interesting and sometimes risky exercise is to talk about politics with Madrid's taxi drivers. You cannot extrapolate from it or reach conclusions, but it does allow you to gauge opinions outside the information frenzy that forms among journalists and politicians in Congress. This week, a driver – who, unlike other times, had no animosity towards Pedro Sánchez – exemplified the weariness generated by Madrid's polarized and extreme political debate, with the eruption of multiple corruption cases, and confessed that he would not vote. He is angry with the right – among other things, Isabel Díaz Ayuso has given the green light to VTCs in the Community – and disillusioned with the left, admitting that he still doesn't know what to think about José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero: "They all end up disappointing me," also citing Pablo Iglesias.

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:

The Designation of Origin (DO) Cava closes a cycle of eight years marked by the presidency of Javier Pagés and opens a new stage. This Thursday, the twelve members who make up the plenary of the regulatory council, the body that represents the different agents of the sector, have chosen the CEO of the Vallformosa wineries, Marta Vidal, as the new president of the DO for the next four years. Vidal, who has had majority support from the plenary members, thus becomes the first woman to hold the presidency of the DO since its foundation in 1972.

If Enrique Riquelme defeats Florentino Pérez at the polls on Sunday, Erling Haaland will be a Real Madrid player. This is the announcement made by the candidate in the white club's elections. Riquelme presented it with a Real Madrid jersey showing the name of the Norwegian star from Manchester City and the number nine, accompanied by a notarized document in which he commits not to sell any percentage of the club if he becomes president. "I have signed a personal notarized guarantee where if I fail to keep any of my promises, I will pay 100% of all fees for Real Madrid's 100,000 members next season," he confessed.

They did not know it yet, but the 1936 elections would be the last before the outbreak of the Civil War, five months after the elections. The left-wing parties, united through the Popular Front, which included, among many other parties, the PSOE, the Communist Party, and ERC, achieved victory. However, the government of the Second Republic never fully published those results, and until now they were not accessible. This changes thanks to the project that three Catalan researchers published yesterday after six years of research. Now, anyone interested will be able to know how their town voted in those elections, which even today some historians question to justify General Franco's coup d'état.

Pedro Sánchez's path to the end of the legislature is getting complicated. In the last few hours, two of the key partners in the investiture majority, Junts and the PNB, have shown signs of distancing themselves from the Spanish government. While the Junts supporters joined the PP and Vox this Tuesday to overthrow the decree extending rents and the investment consortium agreed between the PSOE and ERC, the Basque nationalists suspended a meeting in Moncloa after a controversial message on social media from the PSE against Aitor Esteban. And all of this has served them to demand "respect" from Sánchez and issue him a warning in this morning's control session in Congress: "You will know how you want to reach the electoral call, whether you want company or not".

Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians have been called to the polls this Saturday in municipal elections to choose local councils in the first elections since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in 2023. The event has allowed, for the first time in twenty years, a vote to also be held in Gaza, in the city of Deir al-Balah, with 70,000 potential voters. In this municipality, one of the few that has not been devastated by the war, the elections have been eminently symbolic: the ballot boxes and the ballots had to be improvised.The day dawned gray in the West Bank. At seven in the morning, the polling stations opened amidst a strange routine: short queues, hushed conversations, and the shared feeling that today people were voting more out of responsibility than out of real hope for change.In a school in Al-Bireh, the capital of Ramallah, converted into an electoral center, voters have entered one by one. Throughout the day, the trickle has been constant. Participation slightly exceeded 53% in the West Bank, while in Gaza –where polling stations closed earlier to count votes by natural light, due to the lack of a stable electricity network– it stood at around 23%, according to the Palestinian Central Electoral Commission, the independent body responsible for administering the elections.“I don’t think this will change much. But if we stop voting, we will disappear even more”, says Bisan, a 29-year-old teacher from Ramallah. “My students find it hard to believe it's worth anything. And I can’t tell them the opposite with complete certainty”.The vote, which took place in more than 420 locations across the territory, has served to elect municipal councils responsible for basic services –water, electricity, roads, waste collection, and building permits–, but its political scope is limited: any relevant decision continues to be conditioned by Israel.The day has arrived, moreover, marked by a restricted political field and a generalized disaffection towards politics. In key cities like Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority, or Nablus, there has been no vote because only one electoral list has been presented, which has been automatically declared the winner. In total, more than forty municipalities and more than a hundred towns have been resolved with the same logic, and in some areas, no candidates were even registered.“We don’t vote thinking about big politics. We vote thinking if we will have light, if they will fix the streets. It’s very little, but it’s what we have”, explains Rasha, a 38-year-old nurse. Her husband, Mohammed, adds: “People have lost faith in the parties, in the Palestinian Authority, in everything.”The majority of the candidacies have been linked to the Fatah movement, led by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas, in power for more than two decades without being re-elected in general elections. In many municipalities, candidacies close to Fatah have competed with independent lists linked to other factions, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, of a Marxist-Leninist character.Omar, a 45-year-old shopkeeper accompanying his elderly mother, both wearing the Palestinian kufia, summarizes the sentiment of many voters: “It’s like choosing between one option and the same option, we don’t vote out of conviction, but out of habit. And because not doing so would be worse.”Voting in campaign tents

In Deir al-Balah, in the center of Gaza, the vote has had an eminently symbolic character, which the authorities themselves describe as a pilot project. This city is one of the few that has not been completely devastated by the war, although in December 2024 an Israeli bombing destroyed the municipal building and killed the mayor and ten workers.Unable to conduct a conventional electoral process or even send ballots or ballot boxes normally, the Palestinian Central Electoral Commission has improvised the system with recycled materials: wooden ballot boxes and blue ink left over from a vaccination campaign. Voting took place in tents and open spaces. All this amidst a fragile ceasefire and new Israeli bombings.Hamas, which won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the Strip, has not officially participated in these elections, although some candidacies have been perceived as close to the group, as reported by Reuters.Beyond the election of municipal councils, the ballots have been interpreted as an attempt by the Palestinian National Authority to strengthen its legitimacy in a context of growing distrust and the absence of national elections since 2006. In fact, some polls place distrust in the Palestinian Authority above 70%. Analysts point out that the Palestinian Authority has wanted to project an image of political, financial and administrative reforms, using these local elections as a symbol. In parallel, the simultaneous holding of elections in the West Bank, in a context of settlement expansion, Israeli settler violence and military control, seeks to reaffirm its institutional relevance. However, the Authority's room for maneuver remains limited: it exercises partial autonomy in the West Bank, while Israel maintains effective control over much of the territory and resources.

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