The president of the Canary Islands government, Fernando Clavijo, of Coalición Canaria, complains that the Minister of Health, Mónica García, has "ridiculed" him and "taken him to the meme" for his theory about swimming rats that could escape from the ship MV Hondius and spread throughout the Canary Islands, biting the suffering citizens at will, an idea he maintained in a screenshot taken from an AI. Perhaps Clavijo doesn't realize it, but he himself has made a fool of himself and offered himself as the protagonist of memes, by providing the synopsis of a B-movie to an extremely delicate health operation with a strong international impact. Clavijo's laughable —but not funny— overacting could not prevent Pedro Sánchez from once again receiving applause from the international community: the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; the UN's António Guterres, and also the President of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, have praised the management of the situation by the Spanish executive. The national spokesperson for Vox, José Antonio Fúster, commented: “How scary, when the WHO praises you, it must be a bad thing.” Because, as we know, the WHO is one of the favorite targets of the lies and conspiracy theories of the global far-right. Perhaps for all these reasons, Clavijo has announced the possibility of taking the Spanish government to court for its handling of the hantavirus (in fact, the arrival of the ship has already been the subject of judicial rulings: on Friday, the National Court rejected an urgent request to halt the disembarkation, and the next day, the Court of First Instance of Madrid confirmed the imposition of a quarantine on the cruise passengers). When the fear mechanism fails them (the theory of the invasion of amphibious rats, however much fun it may have generated, was nothing more than an attempt to sow fear among the population), they always have the option of taking matters, whatever they may be, to court. They don't always win (often they do), but at least they have managed to bog down the discussion.Experts at spreading falsehoods and judicializing, the ultra entity Abogados Cristianos has raised a outcry because they want to prevent Pope Leo XIV, during his visit to Barcelona in a month, from visiting the Lluís Companys stadium because, they allege, under Companys' mandate "more than eight thousand people were murdered". They refer to the persecutions of religious by the FAI during the Civil War, but they omit precisely this: that there was a Civil War caused by a military and fascist uprising, which had the support of the Church. They propose that, instead of the Lluís Companys stadium, the pontiff go to the Valley of the Fallen, as they still call it. It seems that under Franco's mandate no one died, starting with the 33,833 people (12,000 of whom were unidentified) that the dictator had buried in his tomb in Cuelgamuros: the largest mass grave in a fascist Spain to which some want to return at all costs.

Since its emergence as a leading player, many political parties have tried to find a way to react to the far-right. The radical populist right's ability to win over diverse voters, as well as to mobilize non-voters and profiles disconnected from politics, disconcerts many formations accustomed to playing on a different playing field. The far-right's rhetoric and the issues it raises, especially immigration, have fueled the desire to build a strategy to confront it. Whether out of conviction or electoralism, how to react to the far-right is a matter of concern and occupies minds.

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.

The joke of the moment: President Díaz Ayuso declares Madrid a “free territory of nationalisms and identity ideologies”, “the most heterogeneous region that exists because it is made up of all forms of being Spanish”. It sounded like a reverberation of one of Francoism's slogans: “España, una, grande y libre”, now concentrated in the capital.

Joint front of entities, unions and parties in Girona against the manager of the Instagram account Girona Perduda, which with more than 30,000 followers has become since the start of the school year a channel for citizen discontent, on aspects such as cleanliness and safety in the streets, linking immigration and crime with a mixture of photos, videos and true data, others exaggerated, disinformation and fake news. Another example of allegedly non-partisan accounts that serve the far-right to polarize public opinion, according to the assessment of experts consulted by ARA, which in December uncovered the links between the administrator of Girona Perduda and Vox.

It was Saturday at eleven in the morning when a man repeatedly stabbed a woman in the back. Then he cut her throat. The Mossos investigation has not been able to determine that they knew each other: everything indicates that she was a victim chosen at random who had the worst of luck.

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.

The Vox deputy for Girona, Alberto Tarradas, gave a tasteless speech playing on the threat of deportation of ERC deputy Najat Driouech, which is not only not a joke, but contains all the elements of fascist hate speech. Pronounced from the lectern of Parliament, it makes one's stomach turn and we are eagerly awaiting the chamber's punishment.

After verbally attacking the ERC deputy Najat Driouech, the also deputy Albert Tarradas, from Vox, backtracked and stammered a confused apology “if my statement may have offended”, while saying some idiocy about humor (fascists, when they threaten, often say they were joking, so they don't have to face the consequences). The hate speech of this Tarradas against a Muslim deputy caused consternation, with reason, and led many to exclaim that such an event had no precedent in the Parliament of Catalonia. In this, they are mistaken: there are precedents, and the most recent ones are found in the trajectory and the political legacy, never sufficiently lamented, of Ciutadans. The aggressive, frontal, defiant style of characters like Arrimadas or Carrizosa, always based on lies or misrepresentations, leading the premises of the discourse to aberrant conclusions, were forms of hate speech, then against Catalan independentism and the left. Ciutadans built a large landing strip for the far-right, on which Vox and Alianza Catalana have comfortably landed with their racist and xenophobic rhetoric, and with their phobia against progressivism —which they call woke—. Now they are not only in the Parliament of Catalonia, but their prospects (especially regarding AC) are to increase their presence significantly.In the Balearic Islands, it is not just any deputy, but the president of the Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne, who also chairs the island delegation of Vox, who is awaiting trial for hate crime for having torn up a photograph of Aurora Picornell and the Roges del Molinar, murdered by fascism on the night of the Epiphany in 1937. But the judicial case against Le Senne —curiously— is not progressing, and it will soon be two years since the events without him having to assume any political consequences either. The reason is the support that the government of the Popular Party, presided over by Marga Prohens, has given him and continues to give him. I mention this as an example of a fact that is quite visible: despite the multitude of voices lamenting that the PP has “let itself be dragged along” or conditioned by Vox, as if it had undergone a dramatic shift in its trajectory, the reality is that the PP's support for Vox wherever they have agreements is total. Not only that: the, let's say, relapses of the PP into supremacist, xenophobic, confrontational, civil war-mongering, and demagogic discourses and attitudes are also no novelty, but rather a well-marked constant in the party's history.All this leads to this dark moment when hate speech is aired with an arrogance that endangers any idea of social cohesion. It does not help at all when the left also falls into populisms of the worst kind, such as Rufián's finger-pointing gesture in Congress against the deputies of Junts. Wanting to fight —out of strategy or pure arrogance— against the far-right with the weapons of the far-right is not a form of audacity, but a direct path to brutalization and failure.

There are definitions that allow us to approach the concept of the far-right. For example, a study by the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) considers it "the most illiberal form a right-wing party can take" and highlights several characteristics, such as hostility towards liberal democracy, nativism, authoritarianism, and populism in its proposals. When, moreover, it contemplates the use of violence, we speak of the far-right. Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde explains that today nativism (the xenophobic way of understanding nationalism that adopts slogans in the style of "Home first") is the main trait that unites the global far-right. But, of course, how is the degree of nativism measured, taking into account, moreover, that there are traditional parties that apply similar policies? Or the degree of populism or hostility towards liberal democracy? Abstract concepts lead to subjective assessments and, in the case of Catalonia, where two parties commonly considered to be of the far-right coexist, we have a clear example.

Opinion polls are the political translation of public opinion's mood at a given moment, and the snapshot that emerges from the poll we published these days in ARA is that of a restless society. It could be described as frustrated. The fact is that the symptoms it presents are those of a fearful society that reacts by turning to the most irate. Polls mark social trends, and in the YouGov poll, we see a government with a president who doesn't excite, but maintains, albeit slightly down, the expectations for the PSC, a Republican Left that would have hit rock bottom and would be on the rise, and a far-right that is soaring. Catalan Alliance places third in voting intention, Vox continues to advance, and both threaten Junts. The Junts supporters are immersed in a serious project crisis and would lose votes on the right and left.Clearly, the moment in which the fieldwork was done can always influence the responses, and in this case, it coincided with the presentation of Gabriel Rufián's personal project, which has leveraged social media communication and effective populism, whether in the Congress tribune or in videos with activist Vito Quiles. The result is that it boosts ERC and keeps it in second place.

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'.

Killing children is not easy; one must know how. In abstract terms, extermination proclamations of an entire people can be made, as Netanyahu or other genocidal leaders do, but the truth is that this job –annihilating creatures– cannot be done by just anyone. Who will go door to door, when the extermination of an entire race is decreed, to finish off all the children living there? Who will be able to pull the trigger or drop a bomb, who will aim with a squinted eye directly at the head of a child who barely stands a few feet tall? Who will plunge a knife into tender flesh and endure the sharp, horrifying screams? Very few people, in fact, could carry out the worst of acts, the most fatal and terrible: ending the life of a defenseless sprout. That is why soldiers must be trained to dehumanize the other in a process that is two-way. Because it is impossible to see “the enemy” in a creature if one has not suffered a significant erosion of one’s own humanity.

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

Alberto Núñez Feijóo has opened a rift in his own party with the adoption of the principle of "national priority", an emblem of the far-right Le Penist movement that has been spreading across the rest of Europe, but which the PP had never embraced. What's more, it had vehemently rejected it.

The Catholic Church has more than 1,000 alleged sexual abuse offenders. This has been acknowledged by the Secretary General and spokesperson for the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), Francisco César García Magán. In a press conference this Friday, the spokesperson for the Spanish Church admitted that they have 1,131 complaints collected over the last five years and a thousand alleged offenders. This is the first time the institution has acknowledged figures of this magnitude.

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.

President Salvador Illa is known for being a punctual person. And this Sant Jordi day, he even arrived a quarter of an hour early. The head of the executive arrived at quarter past four at the PSC stall when journalists had been summoned for half past four and made a lightning tour of the intersection of Rambla Catalunya with Diputació street. There, Illa took the first photos with some supporters and exchanged a few words with the second vice-president of the Parliament's board, David Pérez, and also with the Minister of Justice, Ramon Espadaler.

Not even a week after the PP and Vox reached an agreement in Extremadura, the two formations are following the same path in Aragon and have also reached a pact to invest the popular Jorge Azcón. The popular party and the far-right party announced the understanding this afternoon in a joint appearance by Azcón and the Vox spokesperson in the Aragonese Cortes, Alejandro Nolasco. The staging is a carbon copy of what they followed in Extremadura to present a policy in line with the Extremaduran one, in which national priority in public policies has been the keystone. But in this case, the furious anti-Catalanism that has characterized the right in the region has reappeared, and this makes it understandable that there is an essential point that includes the defense of "freedom against indoctrination" with two star measures: "freeing Aragon from the imposition of Catalan" and initiating the "abolition of the Aragonese Institute of Catalan". That is, the PP and Vox have agreed to eliminate Catalan in Aragon.