It has become commonplace to see the Spanish government lose votes or need to reach agreements with multiple political parties. But it was ten years ago that the PP and the PSOE began to face this dilemma. The elections of December 20, 2015, led to unprecedented fragmentation in the Congress of Deputies and ended the historic two-party system: the PP lost 83 seats, while Podemos and Ciudadanos—from Catalonia—entered the lower house with 69 and 40 deputies, respectively. Despite their obvious political differences, on election night both parties offered the same diagnosis: Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, proclaimed that a "new Spain" had been "born," and Albert Rivera, the most visible figure of Ciudadanos, celebrated the beginning of a "new political era of hope and optimism." Neither project has that strength today—Ciudadanos has even disappeared—but the two-party system has not been restored. Now Vox and Sumar have taken up the mantle to consolidate a system with four national parties coexisting with the string of regional parties that are also key to governance.

The secretary general of Podemos, Ione Belarra, opened a can of worms a few weeks ago in an interview in the newspaper ARA when she reiterated the opposition of the purple party to the transfer of immigration powers in Catalonia because she considered that if the Mossos took over these functions they would do "racist raids"This isn't the first controversy Podemos has generated in Catalonia, despite its commitment to the plurinational state. One of the most notorious was when the then-Secretary General of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, declared that the independence movement had awakened fascism in the wake of the Trial, just before the start of the 21-D campaign in 2017. "I seek to awaken the greatest threat to democracy: the specter of fascism." At an event in Sant Adrià de BesòsIglesias lumped together Espanyol supporters and separatists, accusing them of seeking "the vote of revenge." In an uncompromising speech, he criticized the separatist movement for making "grandiose promises that they knew were lies," refusing to admit that the state had refused to seek a democratic solution and had opted solely for the path of repression.

Pablo Iglesias, former leader of Podemos and former vice president of the Spanish government, will no longer teach Political Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. Iglesias had been teaching there for three years, but now he's out of work: he failed to secure any of the associate professor positions that had been put out for bid.

It is completely unusual for a sitting prime minister to encourage the opposition to present a motion of no confidence, which is what Pedro Sánchez did this Monday. He added his votes to those of the PP and Vox. In fact, the motion would serve Sánchez as a second vote of confidence: it would make it clear that there is no alternative majority and could exhaust the legislature. Conservative electorate that does not understand why, having a corrupt and autocratic government as they are led to believe every day, everything possible is not being done to drive Sánchez away from La Moncloa. Once again, the Spanish prime minister manages to place himself in a position of win-win With this strategy: if the motion is presented, he wins, and if it isn't presented, he manages to weaken Feijóo's image. And most importantly, it shifts the focus onto the opposition, which must now explain why it isn't presented. A trick motion.

New installment in the series of the WhatsApp between Spanish President Pedro Sánchez and former Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos. The World revealed this Monday the outbursts of the secretary general of the PSOE with the men dissidents of her party, this Tuesday she will be receiving the current Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles. In the conversation, from November 2020, Sánchez and Ábalos comment on an interview with Robles on La Sexta, where the minister responded to some complimentary statements by the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, about her and the work of the army during the pandemic. Robles replied that those good words were for the armed forces, who "did a priceless job." And that's where Sánchez and Ábalos mock the minister: "Above good and evil. National heritage," says Ábalos. "She sleeps in uniform [...]. She's a bird", says Sánchez.

It's unusual for a party's leadership to not allow the president of a region to present a book at its stand. And even less so in Catalonia on Sant Jordi Day. But it's also unusual for him to publish a book to attack the state leadership for appointing and removing regional leaders by fingerThe fact is that Alejandro Fernández has finally been able to sign his book, In underwear off (La Esfera de los Libros, 2025), at the PP parade and not just at the student platform's "It's Over," as planned just two days before Sant Jordi.

Pablo Iglesias (Madrid, 1978) speaks to ARA at the headquarters of Canal Red, the platform he founded two years ago with the goal of "breaking media hegemony" and "fighting the ideological battle." "Journalism in Spain is one of the cancers of democracy," the former Podemos leader and former Spanish vice president maintains during the interview. Iglesias places the media as a key player in the "process of Spain's right-wing shift," which he describes in his new book. Intimate Enemies (Navona, 2025), in which settles scores with public figures Who is to blame for this trend?

"A minister has much less power than the owner of a television station, the director of a newspaper, or the owner of a social network." Pablo Iglesias's latest book, Intimate enemies (Navona), edited by journalist and Iglesias collaborator Irene Zugasti, basically has one common thread: to demonstrate Spain's progressive "rightward shift" and to point the finger at those he considers to be the culprits. With the media—and journalists—in his crosshairs, but also politicians, the former Podemos leader, now focused on continuing his political career through Canal Red, settles scores with many of those who have been his allies at one point or another.

Journalist Antonio García Ferreras has defended himself today against accusations of having spread false news about Pablo Iglesias following the publication of some recordings made by former police superintendent José Manuel Villarejo. "We have never given false information knowing it was false, neither information about accounts in the Grenadines nor any other. Neither about Podemos nor about anyone else," said the journalist at the beginning of the broadcast of Al rojo vivo, the programme he directs and presents on La Sexta, a channel of which he is also a director. This weekend Crónica Libre published some recordings made by Villarejo in which a conversation between the former superintendent and Ferreras can be heard. In the recordings, the journalist doubts the veracity of the information about Pablo Iglesias's alleged bank accounts in the Grenadines, a tax haven, which was given to him by Eduardo Inda, a journalist from OK Diario. "I told him: 'Eduardo, this is very serious. I'll go with it, but it's very delicate and too crude," Ferreras says in the recording.

Pablo Iglesias, a leading figure of the Spanish political and media landscape in the past decade, will contribute fortnightly to ARA's opinion pages.

"I'm leaving everything, eh?", Pablo Iglesias announced to one of his collaborators from his office when the results of the elections in Madrid already reflected that the bet had failed. The decision did not surprise the interlocutor, unlike the decision to leave the second vice-presidency of the Spanish government to fight the regional battle against Isabel Díaz Ayuso. In the upper floors of the Podemos headquarters, where leaders and members of the candidacy were locked in to follow the count, the news spread shortly before the former leader of the purple formation went down to the press room to announce the resignation. Throughout the night there was no spokesperson assessment, which can now be read as a clue as to what ended up happening.

The until recently vice president of the Spanish government, Pablo Iglesias, announced this Tuesday his resignation as head of Unidas Podemos as the culmination of Madrid elections: "I leave all my posts, I leave the party and institutional politics". He has been the last of the candidates to appear, but in front of the microphone of the party headquarters his message was to the point. "When you are no longer useful you have to know how to withdraw". A motion of censure in Murcia has ended his political career. Butterfly effect.

The overwhelming triumph of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid establishes the PP's radicalisation for the polarisation of Spanish politics. It is the victory of a Trump-inspired populism and it is, at the same time, the normalisation of the far-right Vox, whose discourse has been whitewashed by an Ayuso who will need its support to be invested president. Ayuso now aspires to everything: to take control of the Popular Party and to prepare a leap towards the government of the Spanish government, from the platform her resounding success in the capital's elections gives her. Ciudadanos's disappearance from the Madrid Assembly, key to Ayuso's victory, leaves open the PP's path towards the hegemony of the right, with its sights set on the government of the State. In fact, PP's candidate has not taken place in a local key, but against the first left-wing coalition government in Spanish history, a PSOE-Unidas Podemos government that was possible thanks to the votes of Catalan and Basque independentists, for whom the ascent of the new leader in pectore of the Spanish far right is a direct threat. The mental distance between the electoral majorities in Catalonia and Madrid is widening. In the Community of Madrid, the unabashed neoliberal discourse and the unleashed Spanish nationalist discourse have won: this is what the sum of Ayuso and her appendage Monasterio represent. Neither the management of the coronavirus nor the corruption cases affecting the PP have taken their toll on this reinvented right wing. What counted more were open bars and the promise of lower taxes, metaphors of a precarious and reductionist ideal of freedom, a flag brandished before the absurdity of a supposed communism embodied by Iglesias.

High tension in the electoral debate organized by Cadena Ser with the candidates for the elections in the Community of Madrid - except that of the PP, Isabel Díaz Ayuso-, which has ended prematurely due to the abandonment of the leaders of the left after the confrontation between Pablo Iglesias and Vox over the threats with bullets that the leader of Podemos received by letter. Iglesias has already warned this morning that if Vox did not condemn the threats with bullets that he received by letter he would not share space with the candidate of the far-right party, Rocío Monasterio, who, far from expressing solidarity with Iglesias, has questioned him.

Everything pointed to it being a debate of all against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, or Ayuso against all. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The only appointment between the six candidates for the Madrid elections became last night a fight between blocks - right against left -, but also a struggle between Vox and Ciudadanos to try to have the key to the next government of the PP, as most polls suggest. In short: it became an attempt by PSOE, Más Madrid and Unidas Podemos to try to warn of the risk that the PP forming a government with the extreme right could pose, not only for the Spanish capital - but also for the State.

The figure of the vice-presidency has a long history in Spain. It is a position of balance: between being the right hand of the president where he does not reach, to act as a counterweight when there are different souls in the government, or to respond to burning issues - as in contexts of economic crisis. Suárez's government after the dictatorship already had three at the same time to try to calm the military during the Transition. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's government also raised the counter again to three. But until the arrival of the first coalition government of the recent democracy there had never been four. Pedro Sánchez's decision in January 2020 was interpreted as a way to subtract weight from the power of the leader of Podemos. With the departure this Tuesday of Pablo Iglesias from the Spanish government, the president achieves another unprecedented milestone - both in Spain and the rest of the world - that of having four women vice presidents.

This Tuesday will be the last cabinet meeting for the hitherto second vice president of the Spanish government and leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, who leaves Pedro Sánchez's executive after just over a year to become a presidential candidate in the Madrid region. The farewell - earlier than planned due to a technicality in Madrid's electoral law, which prevents him from being a candidate and member of the Spanish executive - will be the second crisis for the current coalition cabinet after the departure of Salvador Illa, although it is expected to be short and controlled, as it was agreed two weeks ago with Podemos. However, Spanish government sources point out that the decision will not be announced until Sanchez communicates it to the king.

Yolanda Díaz will be the new third vice-president of the Spanish government and will keep the labour portfolio when the current second vice-president, Pablo Iglesias, leaves the administration to become a Podemos candidate in the regional elections in Madrid on 4 May. According to government sources quoted by EFE, Podemos would have agreed to lose the second vice-presidency in exchange for keeping the Labour portfolio, one of the portfolios with the greatest social and political weight.