The scenarios are changing and the timid recovery in the polls in the last few days for the PSOE –which started from very low in the surveys– may change after the Urda railway tragedy. Until now, even though Pedro Sánchez had climbed positions in the surveys of the last few days and the PP had suffered a decline, there was a trend that remained: Vox continued to rise and had options to join forces with the Popular Party to steer the Spanish government. However, the downward trend of Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party has generated unease among the ranks of Santiago Abascal's followers to the point of fearing whether a right-wing sum to reach the Moncloa will be possible, according to Vox sources consulted by ARA. In fact, this fear is also spreading within the PP, as this newspaper has noted.

At the beginning of this week, the PP planned to focus its pre-election speech on security. Hence, on the day of the Toledo train accident, Alberto Núñez Feijóo was in Barcelona. The Popular Party had called the media at noon to Plaça Urquinaona to visit the shops affected by the looting. The message, which he had already deployed the day before from Madrid, was that only a Popular Party government could guarantee "order" and firmness in the face of unrest. However, the crash between the AVE and the Iryo on the Madrid-Andalusia line changed all plans. Feijóo rushed back to the Spanish capital and at 4:15 p.m. summoned the press to the party headquarters on Génova Street to react to the tragedy.

The Spanish commitment to high-speed rail has always seemed to me a matter worthy of analysis in political, sociological, and even historical terms, because it has transcended governments and parties and has established itself as a mantra of public management, which reveals, in my opinion, some obsessions that have become unhealthy.

The electoral pre-campaign has been blown to pieces. Until the accident in Toledo, what we had was a comeback for the PSOE that, even if it might not have been enough to break the PP-Vox majority, was enough to put Alberto Núñez Feijóo in a bad spot and weaken his leadership. Now the PSOE and the left have no choice but to activate survival mode to prevent the conservative wave from running them over. And this opens up the range of other multiple battles.

The PP proposes 14 measures to build a million homes (it is not known if they are market-rate or affordable). One of the measures is the approval of a new land law that provides security for urban planning. Oh, how we have no memory. This formula was already tested and led to a regrettable involution of the precarious science of cities: between 1998 and 2006, 5.5 million homes were built in Spain by liberalizing land. In Catalonia, a territory equivalent to 3% of its surface area was urbanized; in Madrid, they ended up consuming 7.46% of the land of the entire region. And housing prices, despite the historical surplus of apartments, grew by 185%. When the bubble burst, it was not only the tenants who suffered: a good portion of the homeowners faced losses if they had to sell their homes because the correction in apartment prices deflated overnight. And who made a fortune? The owners of fields and rustic land on the outskirts of cities, who had been accumulating land where they knew planning would enable new neighborhoods. There must already be someone making selective purchases around the cities in case Feijóo finally becomes president.

Despite their non-aggression pact, in these Spanish elections a particular battle is being waged between the PP and Vox to mark territory within the conservative bloc. The extreme right is the one rising in the polls, although it still remains far from the Popular Party. In Catalonia, however, it is Vox that is winning the battle, at least the symbolic one. In the right-wing agreement for the Senate, collaboration has been agreed upon in 23 provinces, which implies that Vox is withdrawing from six constituencies, the PP from three, and that Santiago Abascal's party is only presenting one Senate candidate (out of the three possible) in 14 more constituencies. However, Vox is the one establishing itself as the reference in Girona and Tarragona.

Tonight it was the turn of the Basque Country, in Bilbao, chaos in the streets. Burning of dumpsters, burning of cars and motorcycles, running, 19 arrested by the Ertzaintza, of which 11 are minors, at the end of an event called by Vito Quiles. The Basque police, by the way, were surprised because it took them an hour to start intervening.

The disturbances of the last few days in A Coruña, Barcelona, and Bilbao have made security the main focus of the PP's discourse this week. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's strategy is to link the incidents directly to Pedro Sánchez and to position himself, in contrast to the socialist leader, as a guarantor of "order". He will do so, for example, by visiting businesses affected by the looting in Barcelona this Wednesday, just as his number 2, Miguel Tellado, visited Bilbao this Tuesday. "From the 30th onwards, there will be order. We will be implacable with the violent ones and the law will always be upheld," Feijóo stated at an event presenting the electoral list for Madrid for the November 29 elections.

The strategy of the PP and Vox to go hand in hand to defeat Pedro Sánchez in the general elections of November 29 is already translating into concrete agreements. Those of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and those of Santiago Abascal have agreed on a collaboration in 23 provinces to curb the left. The Spanish right announced this "understanding" this Monday with the aim of trying to neutralize the alliance that the PSOE and the Broad Front had already closed ten days ago to run in coalition in the upper house. Thus, the Senate elections will show, much more clearly than in the Congress, where these formulas have not been reproduced, the clash between two opposing blocs united to maximize the chances of obtaining representation. In this sense, the Popular Party members have claimed that it is an "intelligent collaboration", while the president of the Spanish government has said that this proves that the PP has become the same as Vox.

The use of Catalan does not stop retreating and many eyes are turning to the school, where the trend is not reversed despite the linguistic immersion of the students. But immersion is also threatened: the courts have been collecting the demands of various entities and parties to increase the use of Spanish up to 25% and, if the PP governs from November 29, the plan of the populars involves exporting the Galician model —which requires a minimum of 50% Spanish— to Catalan classrooms. And this is despite the fact that this same week the mayor of Badalona and head of the PP list in Catalonia on 29-N, Xavier García Albiol, acknowledged that there is "a very serious problem" due to the "retreat" of Catalan and asked that action be taken to reverse the trend – words, on RTVE, that sparked the fury of various Spanish nationalist entities–. For the moment, the scheme with which the party leadership in Catalonia works is inspired by the report that in 2018 was drawn up, curiously, by an ERC minister: Josep Bargalló.

“My first objective is for Sánchez to leave,” said Feijóo when Aimar Bretos (Cadena SER) asked him if he would make a pact with Vox. The end justifies the means: whitewashing the extreme right. We all know that if Sánchez does not lose, he will not govern, but it is a lack of respect for the citizenry and an unusual display of his limitations that Feijóo permanently deflects the ball and, instead of explaining what he wants to do and why he wants to do it, entrusts everything to the president's attrition.

The same faces, but a different interaction. Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal are repeating as candidates for the right-wing bloc in the November 29 elections, but, unlike the previous elections three and a half years ago, the strategy of the PP and Vox on how to relate to each other has transformed. They have gone from the mistrust and crossed attacks of 2023 to a kind of non-aggression pact between the two parties, which have assumed that, for now, they are doomed to understand each other if they do not want to find themselves relegated to the opposition again. It is an assumption they no longer hide and which the right-wing media celebrates, urging Feijóo and Abascal not to repeat the mistakes—they are reproached for having been overconfident and harming themselves by fighting each other—that allowed Pedro Sánchez to continue governing to this day.

Significant movements in the Plus Ultra case. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has formally requested the indictment of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for embezzlement for having kept the jewels gifted to him by the King of Saudi Arabia in 2007 during an official visit to Spain, according to the document to which ARA has had access. It was the former Spanish president who, a month ago, assured the judge that this was the origin of the most valuable jewels that the UDEF found in his office last May. Prosecutor Elena Lorente now asserts that this may lead to the presumption that he also committed a crime of embezzlement. For the moment, in the part of the case related to the jewels, he is only being investigated for tax crimes and smuggling.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo begins to outline his conservative program for the Spanish elections on November 29th. The leader and candidate of the PP stated on SER that if he reaches the Moncloa he wants to reopen the debate on abortion and reform the euthanasia law, in an interview in which he openly accepted the scenario of a government with Vox to oust Pedro Sánchez from power. "I am a democrat," he said, regarding the possibility of having to rely on the ultra-right if he does not achieve a sufficient majority.

For me, when instead of saying “a hug” they send me a circumspect baby wearing sunglasses or a kitten drinking a cocktail on WhatsApp, I really feel like pouring myself a few deciliters of rat poison in a Pompadour glass. Now in the groups of what already it is very noticeable when someone has received a new meme. Whatever you say, they send it to you to finish you off. It is like this reader we have at ARA (I love him infinitely) who, on every piece of news, whether it talks about Brad Pitt, the DANA, or the queues on the AP-7, complains about Spain by calling it “Ñ”. Well then. We were few and now the PP has appeared. Now –and I fall asleep while writing this– they have made a video with artificial intelligence (it goes without saying that the intelligence is artificial and not natural) to mock and ridicule the PSOE. Since –zzz...– Pedro Sánchez made a video playing with the double meaning of "left-handed (in Spanish, left-handed), now they have tweeted another where several PSOE members appear (using artificial intelligence), among them José Luis Ábalos praising prostitution. “If going to prostitutes is being a leftist, then I am a leftist,” they make him say.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo is doubling down on his commitment to project an image of a forceful PP against Pedro Sánchez – also in response to the rise of Vox – and has chosen to place one of the party's harshest and most incendiary voices in the number two spot on the list for Madrid. Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (Madrid, 1974) ascends to this position ahead of November 29th, in an election that she herself defines as "existential, historic, and decisive" for the future of Spain. The PP leader confirmed his choice this Thursday after days of hints that already suggested he would bet on a profile that has been characterized as an internal loose cannon. Álvarez de Toledo deploys her own sharp, ideological discourse which, in previous stages, she has not hesitated to direct even against her own party's leadership, as happened with Pablo Casado, with whom she ended up in conflict.

The other day Feijóo announced that he would build a million apartments thanks to the fact that, with a government of his, there would be “less bureaucracy”, but instead of less bureaucracy, he said “less democracy”. He often does not know how to interpret what he is reading. The other day he said that he would only address the hardworking people and not the freeloaders, and when saying “freeloaders” (“scammers”) he did this. These slips make him meme fodder, and deepen the evidence that the personality of the favorite candidate in the polls to preside over Spain does not measure up, but not because he is often wrong, but because he is a politician from a past era.

In the midst of the pre-campaign, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has personally committed to "guaranteeing Spanish" in classrooms. In practice, this means following the model that the PP leader applied in Galicia when he governed there and which, in Catalonia, would entail reducing teaching hours in Catalan. Let's review how the linguistic model of the schools in the autonomous region currently presided over by the Popular Party's Alfonso Rueda, successor to the now candidate for the Moncloa on November 29th, works, and which entities in defense of Galician and experts in sociolinguistics label as "disastrous" and "catastrophic".

Alberto Núñez Feijóo wants to show that he has nothing to do with Pedro Sánchez. The PP leader describes the Spanish Prime Minister as someone without any moral values, who uses institutions for personal interest and who systematically lies to the citizenry. Faced with this, Feijóo staged an event this Monday in Madrid, surrounded by much of the party's top brass, where he pledged to be the complete opposite. "Spaniards deserve a president who always tells them the truth," he stressed, also committing to "the law," "effort," and "unity." The Popular Party president has signed a document, titled "my contract with Spain," which gathers this philosophy and twelve other points, including the promise to reinforce Spanish in Catalan classrooms.

From being disparagingly called the Monguer by some of her party colleagues to receiving the nickname of the Empress. The rise of Isabel Díaz Ayuso within the Madrid PP has been as surprising as it has been meteoric. How has she managed to go from contempt to hegemony? The journalist David Fernández (Madrid, 1975) analyzes this trajectory in the book Ayuso. Zancadillas, intrigas y venganzas en la Corte de Madrid (Libros del K.O., 2026), an unauthorized biography for which he has spoken with 180 people who have known the current president of the Community of Madrid in different stages of her political career.