After a summer of stifling heat, fires and torrential rains, it seems that autumn has finally arrived in Catalonia. We are entering fully into an electoral pre-campaign, now without torrid nights that do not let us sleep, mobile alerts or heat waves. But everything points to the fact that climate change will be one of the great absentees of the debate.

A few days after Vox deputy José María Figaredo opened the door to a change in the public pension system in Spain, the PP spokesperson, Esther Muñoz, said in an interview that her party is preparing a reform of the model because she considers that it "will collapse" if changes are not made. "The system, as it stands at the moment, will collapse," Muñoz said in a podcast, and added that the main problem is that "the boomers" are now joining it, who receive higher pensions. Muñoz states that this issue "must be faced with courage and by telling people the truth, understanding that the model must be changed".

The announcement by the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, of the dissolution of the Cortes and the call for general elections on November 29th has put the country's productive fabric on alert. The Catalan association of small and medium-sized enterprises, Pimec, has demanded that the main parties ensure the upcoming election campaign serves to "place the productive economy and SMEs at the center of the political debate." In a statement, the organization presided over by Antoni Cañete demanded that "the political situation does not sideline the reforms needed by the productive fabric."

There is no doubt that the election campaign for the February elections is the most atypical in the history of democracy, for a number of well-known reasons: basically, a cross between the pandemic, so harsh, and the judicialisation of the Independence bid, so vengeful. After a government without a president had decided to delay the date with the polls to ensure health safety, Catalonia's High Court has imposed the celebration on February 14 with the political argument that there is an "intense public interest" to hold them. We'll see how this intense interest translates into participation. In fact, for the time being, the polls suggest that abstention will rise sharply. An abstention that, on the other hand, given the way the campaign is going, will not decrease. Because the reality is that, despite being immersed in an unprecedented health and economic crisis, neither the one nor the other is the main concern of the political parties that are running for office. It is as if they were not aware that hospital care is at its limit, that health centres are overwhelmed, that delays in vaccination will only prolong the presence of the virus, that the number of daily deaths remains obscenely high and that many businesses have been forcibly closed due to restrictions - many of which will no longer be able to reopen -, that schools are barely weathering the storm of a school year with covid-19, that indispensable in-person attendance in the universities has practically disappeared, that there has been a visible increase in homelessness and poverty in the street... Because all this is hardly mentioned in the campaign.

The political prisoners are leaving prison again today, after yesterday they received the open prison regime again. It was granted by the Ministry of Justice of the Generalitat, and it will allow them to go out on the streets during the day but will have to return at night to sleep in prison from Monday to Thursday. The only one who will not leave prison is president Forcadell, because there is an outbreak of coronavirus in the prison of Wad-Ras.