Calm, serene, and placid are three adjectives used within the Catalan PP to refer to the regional congress that will be held on June 27. Who would have thought, when not long ago Alejandro Fernández seemed doomed by Alberto Núñez Feijóo's inner circle. But there is still uncertainty in some of the moves to shape the new leadership. Especially in a triple change that is being strongly rumored within the PP, with the bet made by Fernández himself, according to multiple sources consulted by ARA: to remove the historic Santi Rodríguez from the general secretariat – so that he ceases to be number two, as he has been until now – and to have the position pass to the current parliamentary spokesperson, Juan Fernández. The consequence would be that the spokesperson position in the Catalan chamber would go to Lorena Roldán, currently deputy, the most questioned piece of the puzzle.

The Andalusian elections confirm that the Spanish right is heading towards living within what Moreno Bonilla and Feijóo had insisted throughout the campaign they wanted to avoid: the mess (in the original version, el lío, a terminology inherited from Rajoy). The mess is having to govern with Vox, and that is exactly what the Andalusian PP will have to do in this new legislature, now that they have lost their absolute majority. In regional negotiations with the People's Party, Vox acts as a party that does not know the meaning of expressions like institutional loyalty or proportionality . Apparently, they don't even understand what negotiating exactly means: for Vox, there is only the possibility of imposing their slogans and ideological obsessions, or breaking the game. They are not government partners: they tutelage governments. Lately, Vox's slogan is called national priority, which means institutionalizing racism, supremacism, and xenophobia, and making them transversal elements in government action. After that, there follows a list of hatreds (feminism, environmentalism, etc.) at the top of which is the Catalan language and anything that Spanish far-right nationalism identifies as "catalan". This is "the mess" that Moreno Bonilla will have to face, who does not emerge exactly unscathed (5 fewer seats and loss of the absolute majority) from the scandal of breast cancer screenings, despite the fact that there were more than enough reasons for the wear and tear to be more pronounced.For its part, the question that the Andalusian PSOE can ask itself is whether it has already hit rock bottom and if it still has sheets to lose in future electoral washes. In hindsight, it is easy to say, but the truth is that the socialists could hardly have chosen a worse candidate than María Jesús Montero, a woman who is Andalusian by birth but who is little or nothing so in practice, much more linked to Madrid, to Pedro Sánchez and to the party apparatus than to Andalusian political discussion, which is intense, dense, and vibrant. The old tactic of sending politicians who have "succeeded" in Madrid as ministers to the "provinces" (Pilar Alegría to Aragon, María Jesús Montero to Andalusia), which has been used so many times by both the PP and the PSOE, interchangeably, is not yielding results for Pedro Sánchez.The significant rise of the sovereignist left Endavant Andalusia, led by José Ignacio García, compared to the blockage suffered by the Sumar, Podem, and Esquerra Unida coalition, Per Andalusia, with Antonio Maíllo as candidate, confirms that "what matters to people" is also ideological, and that sovereignism makes sense (and has voters) when it is presented as a form of democratic improvement, linked to the demands for the rights and freedoms of individuals, both individually and collectively. The fact that Endavant Andalusia has received more votes than Vox in constituencies like Cádiz or Seville is also relevant. By blocs, the right-wing parties total 68 seats, compared to 41 for the left-wing parties. The mess that we already know in the Balearic Islands or in the Valencian Country is beginning in Andalusia.

Juanma Moreno Bonilla entered to applause at the PP's state headquarters the day after the Andalusian elections. Despite the bittersweet taste of his victory, this Monday among the popular ranks the "spectacular" result obtained by the popular candidate is claimed. In statements to the media at the entrance of the party's state board of directors, Moreno Bonilla has argued that, no matter how much he has fallen two deputies short of an absolute majority, the 53 seats are a "sufficiently forceful" result to leave Vox out of his future regional executive. "It is a very good result that gives us room to maneuver to govern alone," he stated. For now, Vox has not set this price, as it did in Extremadura and Aragon, awaiting the start of negotiations. Moreno explained that he has not yet had contact with Santiago Abascal's party.

Today it is Barcelona's turn in the teachers' protests and the strikers have gathered in one of the most visible places in the city, the Sagrada Família. These strikes that teachers are carrying out by regions are multiplying the effect of the sector in struggle and are making the crisis long for the Government.Meanwhile, the Government is preparing for this week, which will be the staging of the budget agreement between the Government, Esquerra and Comuns.While Esquerra is convening the national council today to give the green light to the budgets, President Salvador Illa is going to Sant Sadurní d’Anoia today to present the initiative for the orbital railway line, the result of the agreement between the Government and Esquerra.

The day has arrived. This Sunday Andalusia votes in elections that are regional and that many will perceive as a genuine primary. But in a certain sense, it is also a final, an event in which morale and the possibilities with which the PP will have to face the rest of the legislature for the whole of Spain are at stake. If the current Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, manages to regain his absolute majority, the bells will ring loud at Calle Génova in Madrid, where the popular party has its central headquarters. And if he does not obtain this result, they will also ring them, but they will emit a different, more subdued sound, because it will be necessary to go looking for Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, to try to guarantee a new parliamentary majority. And from previous experiences, it is already known that an operation of this kind is always a headache.

The Community of Madrid "is doing very well" and claims to be "the economic engine of Spain". However, according to Isabel Díaz Ayuso's government, this positive scenario occurs "despite" Pedro Sánchez's executive. Sources from the Madrid Ministry of Economy and Finance denounce "the asphyxiation" to which, in their opinion, the State has subjected them. Since 2019, when Ayuso took the reins of the regional government, the "consolidated debt" of the Spanish government with Madrid already amounts to 12,367 million euros, according to the calculation of Ayuso's team. "Mr. Sánchez's government is holding hostage the money of the people of Madrid that goes to issues as important as healthcare, dependency, or education," says the counselor Rocío Albert, in charge of Madrid's economic affairs, in statements to the press.

"We trust in the comeback." In this way, the PSOE spokesperson, Montse Mínguez, responded this Monday to all the published polls that point to a historic defeat for the socialists in the Andalusian elections on May 17. "Let's not get demoralized, quite the opposite," she added, and assured that there are "many people worried about public services" who will trust María Jesús Montero to change the model that the PP has established in the last two legislatures. "We will fight until the end, the vote is on May 17 and that is the poll that counts," she stated.

The day after the Andalusian elections on May 17, the "process of fiscal cession and privileges to Catalan separatism will be restarted". This is the thesis of Juanma Moreno, the PP candidate, presented during the first week of the electoral campaign in Andalusia. And this, as this newspaper published less than a month ago, the new Minister of Finance, Arcadi España, has even closed the door to the total collection of personal income tax. Nevertheless, this argument serves Moreno to argue that a "strong" and "stable" government is needed to "confront this injustice". Vox also resorts to Catalonia, using the old argument of comparative grievance between Catalans and Andalusians against the PSOE candidate, María Jesús Montero, España's predecessor at the head of the Spanish Treasury. In fact, the hypothesis that the right-wing parties fuel is that the PSOE is temporarily deceiving Andalusians so as not to harm Montero in the electoral race. They also reproach him for the new regional financing model agreed with ERC, which they claim harms Andalusia, even though it would add almost 5,000 million euros annually, when Moreno was asking for 4,000, at least until the end of last year.

It was only a matter of time before the management of the hantavirus crisis spilled over into the political arena. This happened on Thursday, two days after the debate began on whether the Canary Islands should be a stop or not for the ship MV Hondius where the outbreak of the disease has been detected. The PP has already criticized the role of Pedro Sánchez's government, and Vox has insinuated that if the Minister of Health, Mónica García, has finally accepted the cruise ship's passage, it is because she expects a future position in the World Health Organization (WHO).

Artificial intelligence (AI) has infiltrated almost every corner of our daily lives, often without us being fully aware of it. A few days ago, the news of a €1,000 fine for a judge for using AI to issue a sentence highlighted the risks of delegating human decisions to algorithms. In this context, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has presented a revealing study on AI's vote recommendation. The results are curious: the PSOE systematically leads recommendations in all languages and platforms, followed at a distance by Sumar and Podemos. In contrast, the PP suffers the consequences: it has 96.3% visibility, but only a moderate recommendation of 28.2%, far from the PSOE. Vox, despite appearing often, receives marginal recommendations, below 6%.The study, jointly led by professors Ferran Lalueza and Víctor Gil, has analyzed 1,220 queries on five major platforms (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity) and in four languages (Catalan, Galician, Basque, and Spanish). "Previous studies have shown that these tools have a great capacity to influence people's voting decisions," says Cristina Aced, a UOC professor and member of the research team, in conversation with ARA. "They are very persuasive when building the foundation of their discourse," she explains.The methodology consisted of formulating 61 questions based on the real concerns of citizens according to the CIS, including housing, unemployment, immigration, and healthcare. To avoid personal biases, the research was not conducted as conventional users, but through an application connector. Aced details that this is done to carry out the study "more objectively", as the system "does not take into account the user's memory or their geographical location". The study also reveals that not all AIs are equally opinionated: ChatGPT and Grok tend to position themselves openly, while Gemini or Copilot are more neutral. According to Aced, this is due to "how they are programmed", although they recall that "in the end it depends a lot on the tool you use and the sources they draw from".

The first rule of authoritarian leaders is to delegitimize institutions and never recognize an electoral defeat. We are seeing this in the United States with Donald Trump, who six years later still has not recognized Joe Biden's victory in 2020. In Spain, it is Vox who applies the trumpism instruction manual to the letter, and it has been weeks since Santiago Abascal and his followers have been propagating on social media and through every means possible the idea that Pedro Sánchez's government is preparing a rigged election for the elections scheduled for next year. This breeding ground is fueled by fake news about Indra's power, about the manipulation of mail-in voting, or about the effects that the regularization of immigrants will have on the census, which is nil. The objective, however, is to create an unbreathable climate, close to insurrection, and to prepare the ground to challenge the results if they do not match their expectations. The risk, however, of provoking a social explosion with violence is very high, as already happened on January 6, 2021, in the Capitol or also in Brasília on January 8, 2023.

Ten months ago, Borja Sémper announced that he had just been diagnosed with cancer. During this time, the illness has kept him away from political activity. This Tuesday, the popular spokesperson has officially returned. Sémper starred in a packed press breakfast in Madrid, where, amidst expressions of affection, he wanted to "bid farewell to this difficult stage" during which his "vital compass coordinates" have changed. The PP leader had already reappeared in some media outlets and this Monday rejoined the party's steering committee. Next week, he will be the one to appear at the weekly press conference in Génova. However, Sémper wanted to hold this event with the specific objective of speaking openly about his pancreatic cancer in order to stop talking about it.

The conservative tsunami that seemed to point to the result of the 28-M elections in Spain –with the vast majority of autonomous communities and large cities dyed the blue of the PP and the green of Vox– could end up becoming a wave that dies on the coast this July 23rd. The push of the populars, who dream of surpassing 160 deputies, seems to have been diluted in recent weeks, and, according to the survey that the Opinòmetre Institute has done for ARA, despite winning the elections with between 125 and 140 deputies, Alberto Núñez Feijóo would have it very difficult to access Moncloa. Not even the sum with Vox (between 22 and 30 deputies) would be enough to surpass the 176 seats that mark the absolute majority in Congress. Even at the high end of the range, the two parties only add up to 170 parliamentarians.

It's not new, but it does intensify every day. The PP of Madrid and the far-right Vox are shamelessly spreading the theory of electoral fraud. In the same vein as Donald Trump in the United States after his 2020 defeat – which ended in a failed coup insurrection – and as the Spanish right had already hinted with attacks on mail-in voting in both the last general elections and the Extremaduran contests, the flag of electoral fraud, which points to Pedro Sánchez as guilty, is once again flying.

Of the 179 municipalities in the Community of Madrid, 114, almost 64% of the total, are governed by the PP. The percentage increases if we focus on the 37 with the largest populations. 70% of the municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants are tinged blue. The Isabel Díaz Ayuso effect caused the left to even lose some of its strongholds in southern Madrid, traditionally called the red belt, in the last local elections of 2023, as is the case with Móstoles and Leganés –second and fourth most populated cities–. The popular party also snatched Alcalá de Henares and Alcobendas from the PSOE –third and tenth, located to the east and north, respectively.

This time we have had a more representative May Day compared to some of the preceding years. In the events called for by the unions, the emotional chord was struck deeply, in mobilizations that respond to a specific political and social situation and that carry a clear message. The main celebration was held in Malaga for various reasons, starting with the fact that Andalusia votes on May 17. The call has allowed for an image of a certain unity of the left, which we already know does not exist in political terms. However, it has become clear that there are indeed essential points of coincidence, susceptible of becoming driving ideas for future initiatives, especially as the general elections approach. The fact that María Jesús Montero and Yolanda Díaz coincided at the Malaga demonstration does not reduce their differences, but it does reflect a common denominator on key issues.

Political parties have been able to hold the first day of the electoral campaign in Andalusia this May 1st, after the starting gun was fired last dawn. And, despite the president of the Regional Government, the Popular Party's Juanma Moreno Bonilla, not wanting to admit it, the party setting the pace of the campaign is Vox. The Andalusian president knows he could lose the majority by just a handful of votes. And that's why his party is concentrating on trying to strengthen the centrist electoral base, to avoid defections, despite the headaches caused by "the 'national priority' that the PP itself has agreed with Vox" in Extremadura and Aragon. The political victory that Alberto Núñez Feijóo has handed to the far-right has completely disrupted an election that is the Galician leader's first acid test after his umpteenth strategic turn with concessions to Le Penism, which popularized the slogan 'Our people first'.

More than forty years have passed since the referendum on Spain's membership in NATO. The vote took place on March 12, 1986, when the former mayor of Barcelona, Narcís Serra (PSC), was Minister of Defense. In these last four decades, Spanish society has changed a lot regarding its knowledge of foreign policy and defense matters, and the majority perceptions about the commitments that membership in the Western world implies. It would now make no sense to reconsider the country's role in its contribution in this area.

The slow but sure capitulation of the PP to Vox has found an anchor point in the principle of national priority, the banner of ongoing negotiations and an alibi for neo-authoritarian shortcomings. The right wing has always operated on the simplistic logic of good guys and bad guys, of "us" and

The agreements between PP and Vox in Extremadura and Aragon have had a "box or fence" that was not only about management, but above all about ideological war. On paper, Vox has won it with the achievement for the first time of "national priority" in "aid, subsidies, and public benefits" – in both regions. As ARA has been able to learn, Vox approached the negotiations as a key scenario for the cultural battle a year before the Spanish elections, with two essential axes: immigration based on the slogan "first those from home"; and deregulation, the chainsaw of the Argentine Javier Milei. National priority has been an agreed element as a prelude to new offensives: "It is the Overton window," say consulted Vox sources, who cite a concept from political science that describes the progressive acceptance of ideas that were initially rejected.