Whenever the Spanish national football team excels in any competition – and let's not even mention if that competition is the World Cup – the index of absurdity in political life skyrockets. Valle-Inclán would have had a field day these days. The image of Felipe VI, Queen Letizia and the princesses – or whatever their title is – Sofia and Leonor sitting on a cheap two-seater sofa watching Spain's match against France on a small TV propped up on some kind of scaffolding, in a damp and dark apartment, seemed like a bad joke. All that was missing was the unborn conceived to complete the picture of an ideal Spanish family, poor but decent and united. Trying to pass off the Bourbons as members of a sort of working-class family, who have a brief moment of happiness when the red one wins, and who then allow themselves to jump, dance, and hug in the humble dining room that is the setting for all their joys and sorrows, is excessive even for such a dilapidated and crude royal house as the Spanish one. At least they could do us the favor of not mocking the poor by dressing up as if they were. However: there is something even worse in all this, and that is that if they do it, it is because those who take care of their communication and image assume that it will work for them. That many citizens will accept the message and feel sympathy for monarchs who are "like them". Simultaneously, M. Rajoy, a former Spanish president who is not being investigated by the justice system (on the contrary: he appears before the courts with ostentatious and tolerated arrogance), has revived a concept from his years in office, that of the Spanish Brand. He gave a recital of it when he made the xenophobic statement that the French team was playing "without Frenchmen," and in a continuation in which, far from rectifying, he took the opportunity to attack the current government. Rajoy's writing (or whoever writes his articles, published, needless to say, in a hard-right online newspaper) is directly related to the Borbons' little house: something bizarre, disordered, unbecoming of a minimally educated person. Every public appearance by Rajoy always has an eccentric touch that in his case is intentional: Rajoy does not disguise himself as poor, but as a fool, and when everyone laughs he achieves exactly what he wanted: in Spanish there is the saying "Ande yo caliente y ríase la gente", which in Catalan could have as an equivalent – never more fitting – that of "Feed me and call me Moor".Rajoy, by the way, says that Sánchez acted as a "informer" to the French, and from the PP they have stated that the successes of the Spanish national team suit Sánchez very well as a smokescreen. If Feijóo and his try to present the red one as an agent of sanchismo, it might turn out even worse for them than comparing work absences with cancer. By the way, showing up at an international forum trying to sell that Sánchez is like Putin, Trump, or Xi Jinping ("an authoritarian president") doesn't fly either. Euphoria makes them lose their rhythm, and that has consequences. Not just in football.

Mariano Rajoy not only downplayed his racist comment about the French team, backed by the PP, but now he is resisting apologizing. Amid the euphoria over Spain's progress to the World Cup final, the former Spanish president has published a new article in El Debate in which he discusses the controversy surrounding him. A chronicle with little footballing content and a lot of politics, in which he directly attacks the Spanish government: "They don't apologize for anything," he even says.

Spanish right-wingers have always had a certain complex regarding France. Seeing French national unity, apparently so well-tied, in contrast to a Spanish nation that has never been able to completely neutralize the peripheral differential facts, seems to make them feel inferior: why them and not us? It disturbs them to have as a neighbor a country that General De Gaulle left substantially structured after the war. If they had the dignity to think about who the reactionary forces entrusted with the structuring of the homeland (General Franco with a war) and to whom the French entrusted it, they would see that there is an abyss that should shame them, but they pretend not to remember. It is not surprising that when the Hispanic right-wing wants to build the nation, resentment emerges and the psychopathology of small and large differences flares up.

Mariano Rajoy's racist comment about the French team continues to generate reactions. After the criticism that has come from France and the condemnation from Pedro Sánchez's government, it is now Lamine Yamal's turn. "Football, if it serves any purpose, is to integrate society," he stated, following the indignation that has been awakened the chronicle that the former Spanish president published after Spain's victory against Belgium, which qualified Luis de la Fuente's team for the World Cup semi-finals.

No, it is not a minor issue. A former Spanish president like Mr. Mariano Rajoy cannot make a racist comment in good faith and then hide his head in the sand: "It's a minor issue," he let slip.. Absolutely not. A racist comment is not a minimizable issue. The very act of trying to ignore it shows a lack of sensitivity to the issue. In reality, Rajoy has given vent – consciously or unconsciously – to a banal racism that is still very present in Spanish society today. You only have to go to football stadiums to hear the insults many players receive.

Tomorrow at 9 the Spain-France game will be played, and banal Spanish nationalism is infiltrating everywhere, including the mobile screens of Movistar customers, which, instead of saying “Movistar” says “with the selection”, regardless of whether the client completely ignores it of the World Cup or the selection bothers them. The performance that states and companies derive from their sports selections explains to what extent sport is also politics and identity is also business. A cruel paradox for so many Catalans who have at some point shouted "neither Spain, nor France, Catalan Countries", and it turns out that tomorrow, it will be one or the other. About M. Rajoy and his comment that France plays without French saying that: first, following their reasoning, Spain plays without Spaniards, and second, that Republican France has felt very offended, but it would be good for them to consider whether the indignation they feel about the racist comment is consistent with the absence of racism in everyday life. Contrary to what this article says, it is not that people like Rajoy bring the World Cup into the realm of identity, but rather that the entire World Cup is a competition of identities (one only needs to look at the anthems, the flags, and the heads of state in the stands). Another matter is what is understood by national identity in each country. But this week there is another important appointment, which is on Thursday, the day on which the Court of Justice of the European Union must rule on the amnesty, specifically on whether the crime of embezzlement is amnestible or not. It is another episode in this judicial quarrel that the Spanish judiciary's refusal to apply the amnesty law as approved by the legislative power more than two years ago, in May 2024, has become. Remember that, to prevent its application, the Supreme Court ruled that, since the referendum was paid for with public money, the leaders of the Process personally enriched themselves because they saved themselves from putting money from their own pockets, like someone who pays for their daughter's wedding with public money (the example is from the Supreme Court). Well, on Thursday the CJEU will rule, but even if the ruling says that the amnesty is in accordance with European law, it will not be automatically applied, but rather then, the Constitutional Court must decide whether the Supreme Court's interpretation is correct or not, presumably it will say no, but this ruling will not arrive until the autumn, practically when Carles Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Lluís Puig will have been in exile for 9 years.  

The racist comment by Mariano Rajoy about the French team football is still ongoing, but the PP has opted to ignore the criticism and play it down. After France protested the words of the former Spanish president, who said the French team is a team with a lot of "level" but "without Frenchmen", Pedro Sánchez's government has come out in force this Monday to use the controversy against the Popular Party. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, has directly demanded that Alberto Núñez Feijóo disavow Rajoy and has asked the media outlet that published his football chronicle, The Debate, who withdraws the article, the sixth by the popular in this World Cup.

Today, dear readers, we will review the figure of the syllogism, proposed by Aristotle. Let's take as an example the statement by the no less well-known M. Rajoy, which acts as the major premise when he writes that the French team is playing in the World Cup without French players. If having players of immigrant origin or diverse ethnicities means that a team is not made up of citizens of that country, and (minor premise) the Spanish team has players of immigrant origin, such as Lamine Yamal or Nico Williams, the conclusion can only be that Spain is also playing in the World Cup without Spaniards.

Since the Football World Cup began, former Spanish President Mariano Rajoy has returned to his commentator persona and regularly publishes his opinion pieces in The Debate about the Spanish national team. Well, send audio messages and from The Debate transcribe them and give them shape. In the article published this Friday night, Mariano Rajoy valued the performance of the French team, Spain's next opponent in the World Cup. He highlighted their high level, but added a racist comment: "They also have a very high-level squad. That said, without Frenchmen." The French government has already censured the words of the former Spanish president and the Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, has described them as "absolutely unacceptable".

Plot twist with a few days until the Kitchen trial ends. The National High Court judge Antonio Piña, who is investigating the case, has finally agreed to investigate the audio recordings of conversations between María Dolores de Cospedal and José Manuel Villarejo about the operation to try to steal information from Luis Bárcenas that could compromise the PP. The former general secretary of the PP, who was also Minister of Defense, had until now one of the big protected names of the case, but justice has finally decided to put a magnifying glass on it due to recordings that also implicate former president Mariano Rajoy.

Mariano Rajoy knows what is expected of him and does not hesitate to give it to his followers. "In football, what really matters is scoring more goals than the opponent. If you don't, you lose. Or, at best, you draw." Yes, the former Spanish president returns to sports commentary for the World Cup and, again, in the digital media El Debate, which four years ago — also for the World Cup and, later, for the European Championship — already opened its doors for him to publish his analyses of the Spanish national team's matches. Rajoy does so without pay and, in fact, without writing: he sends audio notes when the matches end so that the media's editors can transcribe them. He did so this Monday after the draw of La Roja against Cape Verde.

Today, June 1, marks eight years since Sánchez has been president of the Spanish government thanks to the motion of no confidence he won against Rajoy. It was the first time a candidate reached the presidency through such a vote.Eight years later we have had the pardons, the amnesty still not completed because the Supreme Court is granting extensions, the demobilized independence movement, Commuter Rail by bus, Illa as President of the Generalitat, an unevenly distributed economic growth, the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of finding a flat, and very strained public services.Without going any further, Catalan doctors are called upon not to do any more overtime, under the eloquent slogan Not one more minute, because they don't finish the work they have and the on-call shifts have already turned days into three eight-hour shifts. Doctors want a response from the administration, like the one teachers have already received, who reached an agreement with the Department of Education this past weekend. This agreement will be submitted for a vote by teachers until Thursday. At the risk of being wrong, I believe that teachers have achieved a good part of what they were asking for, the strike has pushed teachers' pockets to the limit and families' patience, and therefore, the most logical thing would be for teachers to vote yes to an agreement reached by unions that did not settle for the first agreement signed by UGT and CCOO. The minister Niubó said this morning that a "no" would lead to the chaos of the education system. With this reality in the streets, political power continues in its own world.Sánchez, who will still take three weeks to explain himself in Congress, is betting everything on the Pope's visit, which will arrive this Saturday in Madrid, the "unity" effect of the Football World Cup, the August holidays and reaching autumn and having 2027 within reach. He himself says it: “The tricksters with their maneuvers, and we to govern until 2027 and beyond, whatever the Spanish want” “Until 2027 and beyond” sounds like it’s from the astronaut of lawfare, will not be new to them. In this analysis, we already told them weeks ago that the Spanish government not only wants to hold on until 2027, but they are also considering re-investing Sánchez.And the one who has already tied his destiny to that of Sánchez is Illa. At an event yesterday in Tarragona, he said, in Spanish so that the Spanish TV channels could broadcast it without subtitles and Sánchez would not be alone, that Sánchez was a “moral benchmark”.

The Zapatero case has opened a parallel debate: what do former presidents do? Do they have any limits in the private sector? One of the arguments used by those around the PSOE to respond to the ruling of Judge José Luis Calama is that Zapatero – president from 2004 to 2011 – has used his contact list to carry out consulting or lobbying tasks, as other former Spanish presidents have done. This, they emphasize, is legal, although the experts consulted warn that there is a legal vacuum regarding the activities that former heads of state can undertake and that there is also no specific regulation for lobbying because it is stalled in Congress.

Mariano Rajoy has always managed to get extraordinary performance out of his public persona. Some time ago, he managed to create, even among his detractors, a kind image, for many even endearing, of a absent-minded man, a little slow, with somewhat bizarre but funny remarks, more interested in football than in politics (sadly, both in Spain and Catalonia, football works as a perfect social whitewash for any scoundrel), old-fashioned, fundamentally a good fellow.All of this, needless to say, is false. It is a facade, half-casual and half-studied, which, as we said, has given him very good results. Rajoy always maintains a clearly visible distance between what happens around him and his person, as if things never concerned him, as if there were no causal relationship between the positions he has held in the Popular Party and in the government of Spain and the crimes that were committed within the party or within the executives he presided over. It doesn't matter if it's the Kitchen plot, the patriotic police, the police charges of October 1st, or any other scandal. He wasn't there, he didn't know anything about it, he was alien to it, his ignorance was absolute. Rajoy also possesses a notable cold-bloodedness, which allows him to lie before a court and remain impassive. Even more so if the president of the court helps him, as Magistrate Teresa Palacios did last Thursday during the declarations of Rajoy and Cospedal at the National High Court, precisely for the Kitchen case.Rajoy, however, is like bad actors, who eventually get tired of playing the same role and then overact. On this occasion, he even denied knowing the aliases by which he was known within the criminal circles organized within the leadership of his party: he claimed to be unaware of the nicknames of el Asturiano, el Barbas, etc. "My name is Mariano Rajoy, as everyone knows." Another of Rajoy's favorite recursos are obvious statements and tautologies, with which he often manages to provoke the audience's smile and facilitate jokes from monologists and impersonators.The reality is that Rajoy's time as president was one of the darkest in Spanish democracy, and that's saying something. These are years of blatant patrimonialization of institutions, of denial of any dialogue with the opposition, of impulse to the ultra ideology that has finally become hegemonic within the Spanish right (now we exclaim, but Rajoy already had ministers who sang "El novio de la muerte" at the processions of Holy Week in Malaga), of constant belligerence against any form of diversity (especially against linguistic diversity, especially against Catalan) and, of course, of organized and institutionalized corruption at all levels of public administration. Perhaps it would be necessary that the next times Rajoy sits before a court it is not to mock justice and citizens again, and to leave as happy as ever.

We now know that Mariano Rajoy's great secret, the masterful formula that explains such a long political career, has consisted of never getting bogged down in details. If we are to believe his account to the judge, a Minister of the Interior, a head of government, or a party leader knows almost nothing about what goes on below him. "I was not aware of the reserved funds for a second of my life when I was Minister of the Interior," he stated. And this is despite the fact that one of his predecessors, José Luis Corcuera, was tried (and acquitted) for fraudulent use of these funds. But the point is that with this formula he has been able to surf through all the scandals that have affected the PP while he was one of the main, or the main, leader. He never knew anything because he wants us to believe that he only dealt with the great matters of state, with high politics.

Mariano Rajoy, former Spanish Prime Minister, declared this Thursday before the National Court for the Kitchen case. Almost a decade after testifying in the Gürtel case, he appeared today and, in an interrogation that lasted 35 minutes, he answered questions about the Popular Party's slush fund, about the operation to spy on and steal information from Luis Bárcenas, and about the use of reserved funds.

Nine years after testifying in the Gürtel case, Mariano Rajoy has returned to the National Court to testify in the Kitchen case. He arrived in San Fernando de Henares at 9:40 a.m. by car and accessed the judicial premises through the parking lot. He responded for thirty minutes, in a statement that began with monosyllables and evasiveness and ended with three pleas in which he distanced himself from the facts and lent a hand to the defenses of the accused. The star phrase came right at the beginning, during the interrogation by the PSOE lawyer, who asked him if he was M. Rajoy, el Asturiano, or el Barbas: "My name is Mariano Rajoy, as everyone knows, and then each person calls me what they want; ask them." After this first display, he dedicated himself to categorically denying everything. "Did you give Bárcenas an envelope with the remainder of the B fund? Did you put the last page of Bárcenas's papers into the shredder? Do you have knowledge that Bárcenas was pressured or intimidated by order of party officials?", asked the PSOE lawyer. These are three questions that the former PP treasurer assured on Monday when he testified as a witness. "Absolutely false", Rajoy limited himself to answering on all three occasions.

I begin where we left off yesterday: the creation of the Investment Consortium that the Government and Esquerra have agreed upon to direct and control state investments in Catalonia. It was presented yesterday as a tool to guarantee budgetary execution in Catalonia. Well, yesterday a prominent Esquerra leader pointed out to me, through a message, in good humor, let it be clear, that I had been very harsh saying that while the Chinese were making humanoids run, we were creating consortia. I hope I am mistaken, but in Catalonia, political consensus on anything significant has disappeared a long time ago. And the State, the governments of the PP and the PSOE, have shown that there are a thousand ways to budget and not execute, making it look like an accident, and even your fault. Nevertheless, as I tell you, if the invention works, we will be here to acknowledge it.And speaking of inventions, Bárcenas and the Kitchen. What the PP treasurer declared yesterday before the judge and for five hours is that the PP itself set up the Kitchen as a way to save Rajoy. That when they saw that the accounting records of M.Rajoy and MR could incriminate the party president, they set up the patriotic police to steal and destroy documentation from Bárcenas. Bárcenas is today a free man, he was in prison for eight years, convicted of corruption. What he came to say yesterday is that Rajoy was aware that the party had double accounting, that Rajoy was paid under the table (because it was he, Bárcenas, who paid him in envelopes), that Rajoy made him destroy the evidence but that he recorded it. What happened is that later most of it was destroyed by the patriotic police. The undeclared money came from commissions paid by companies to which the PP government awarded public works, and it is the money with which part of the renovation of the party headquarters in Madrid was paid for. Yesterday, therefore, Bárcenas sang La Traviata and Rajoy and Cospedal will declare the day after tomorrow.So the Kitchen operation would have been mounted from within the state itself by the PP government to prevent it from splashing Rajoy. These were the "patriots" who were to save Spain from the clutches of Catalan independence. The same "patriots" who will now investigate the United States to find out if Spain deceived them to close Banca Privada d'Andorra. "Mariano, be strong".Good morning.

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.

From the author of "It is the mayor who wants the residents to be the mayor." and of "Very Spanish and very Spanisharrives in bookstores The art of governing (Almuzara, 2025). Mariano Rajoy presented his new book Wednesday evening, which, according to his own definition, is "a reflection" of his "way of being, thinking, and seeing life." "It's impossible to read this sentence and not hear Rajoy," remarked Alberto Núñez Feijóo during the event, referring to one of the reflections included by the former president of the Spanish government and of the People's Party (PP), namely, "the only serious thing is to be serious."