The judge of the Gijón Court of First Instance has ordered the total cessation of the activity of Núcleo Nacional and the closure of its headquarters in Madrid, Burgos and Valladolid, as well as the blocking of the digital content of its social media profiles. The decision comes after the arrest of 14 of its members last Friday. In addition, the magistrate has imposed several precautionary measures on the detainees, such as the withdrawal of their passports, the prohibition of leaving the national territory and the obligation to report weekly to the court.

After the interview that David Broncano conducted with Santiago Abascal on La revuelta on La 1, the presenter might as well quit. Giving in to the leader of Vox is unworthy of public television. Above all, for accepting that Vox vetoed the usual audience to accommodate a claque selected by the party. Spectators who, even before entering the theater, and from the stalls, shouted “¡Presidente! ¡Presidente!” and applauded every one of the guest’s responses.

The resounding slap to Trump, Lula's triumph, the changes in Bulgaria, and the youth riots throughout Europe are good news. They seem to announce that the growth of the far right is stopping, halted by its own rashness and omnipotence. I must say that, personally, it was my most optimistic hypothesis; while these parties presented themselves as an alternative to the democratic parties that have held hegemony for years, which have clearly worn thin in power and, above all, have lost power due to the growth of multinationals, they could channel the hope of many people who have been becoming impoverished in this stage of toxic capitalism. But the far right's haste to change everything, to impose its law of the strongest, has been so great that the population has very quickly understood what they intended and is reacting and seeking other alternatives.

Polls have been warning for some time of a transfer of votes from Vox to Aliança Catalana in the event of elections to the Parliament, as Sílvia Orriols' party is seen, even by Spanish nationalist voters, as the most competitive in the field of immigration in Catalonia. Specifically, in the YouGov poll published by ARA in May, 23% of Vox voters said that this time they would lean towards Aliança. Aliança is not running in the upcoming Spanish elections on November 29, so the far-right voter has only one option, which is Vox. Is it possible that, in the same way that there are Spanish nationalist voters willing to vote for Sílvia Orriols in a Catalan election, there are pro-independence voters from Aliança who lean towards Santiago Abascal's party in a Spanish election? ARA has collected testimonies from Aliança Catalana sympathizers who claim that this coming November 29th they will vote for Vox. Sílvia Orriols herself already opened the door to this possibility in an interview, highlighting the fact that voters belong to no one, ergo giving permission, if one can call it that, for her supporters to vote for a neo-Francoist style party, yet one with which they share the core of the anti-immigration discourse.

Anti-Catalan controversy in Northern Catalonia. The far-right municipal government of the symbolic city of Elne has decided to celebrate for the first time the partition of Catalonia resulting from the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 –a consequence of the Catalan defeat against Castile in the Reapers' War–, which meant that the Catalan regions of Roussillon, Capcir, Alta Cerdanya, Vallespir, and Conflent remained under the yoke of the Kingdom of France. It will do so in an event this Saturday organized by the local executive of the ultra Steve Fortel –who supported the collaborationist Marshal Henri Pétain and who ran with the local candidacy Elne à Cœur, which is positioned even further to the right than the National Rally– to exalt the dismemberment of Catalonia. The initiative has generated much controversy.

There is no infallible manual for fighting the far right and, despite the different recipes applied, it continues to grow almost everywhere. As in medicine, and just as the package inserts themselves warn, each case is different and the remedies have a point of unpredictability depending on the context. However, the political scientists consulted by ARA agree that the strategy of Pedro Sánchez and Salvador Illa of constantly confronting the far right and self-appointing themselves as the only alternative to Vox and Aliança Catalana can have serious side effects, both for their own political health and for democracy in general.

What if the main threat to the European Union was not Russian aggression, Chinese exports, or US President Donald Trump, but rather came from within the bloc?

La Velada del Año VI, organized by Ibai Llanos, is a major event of streamers and celebrities with a large following among young people. The act, held last July, consists of boxing matches between internet personalities, interspersed with performances by well-known singers, especially trap and reggaeton. 80,000 people, mostly young, filling the La Cartuja stadium in Seville, and millions following it live from all over the Spanish-speaking world. A grandiose staging filled with grandiloquent tales, sentimentality, and, obviously, plenty of slaps, all to end up reproducing already well-known values: stories of personal improvement represented by streamers flush with money who train for months for a fight from which they take home a good cut. All seasoned with tacky references to Romans, many Spanish flags, romantic relationships of the streamers typical of the Disney of forty years ago, objectification of the woman's body – bad boy trap accompanied by Christian crosses– and many boys with the same haircut, very short, obviously.

“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.

In an interview with El Periódico and published this Sunday, the PP candidate for the presidency of the Spanish government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said that “government with Vox can work, it already does so in four autonomous communities”. It was not so long ago that PP leaders, and especially Feijóo, avoided being photographed with those from Vox at demonstrations, so as not to be associated with the far right. Those were the times when Vox called the PP “derechita cobarde”, while they were eating into their ground and electorate.

"Challenging the narrative of the far right". This was the title of the debate organized on Thursday by the Biennal de Pensament and the CRÍTIC School of Thought, at the former La Model prison. It is clear that the public is not indifferent to everything surrounding this issue: the venue was at full capacity with more than 200 people, and about thirty attendees—mostly young people—were left outside.

Justice must not kill. This idea is part of the European legal consensus built around human rights. In the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, no one has been executed since 1997, when the last execution took place in Ukraine. Abolition is today a condition for membership. The exception on the continent is Belarus, outside the Council of Europe, which maintains capital punishment. But this legal consensus coexists with a certain social erosion. According to the 2025 Barcelona Social Values Survey, 35.7% of Barcelona residents believe that the death penalty can be justified always or in some circumstances; among young people aged 15 to 24, the percentage reaches 47%. The trend is not only local. In several countries of the European Union, support for capital punishment is around 50% or higher. In the United Kingdom, in recent months, far-right groups have proposed reinstating it, also appealing to opinion polls. All of this is part of a broader context in which the European populist right advocates for increasingly harsh penal policies.

Ungovernable? At this point, the unusual situation with two decrees (two packages of measures that aspire to be voted on as decrees) competing with each other, so to speak, to be approved in Congress, is more of a snapshot of Spanish politics: fragmentary, tense, contradictory, difficult to govern. But also plural and diverse. The two decrees, or the two aspiring decrees, are, after all, a portrait in the form of a legislative rarity of what the majority that invested Pedro Sánchez is. A conglomerate of forces that ideologically goes from Junts to Podemos (neither of the two is far-right or far-left, by the way, but they do take pleasure in the role of uncomfortable partners and tough nuts to crack), passing through ERC (which tries to overcome post-process populism with Rufian-style populism), the Basque right and left (much clearer and more solid than the irritated, and irritating, Catalan independence struggle), plus another conglomerate, Sumar, which everyone knows has not worked, but which includes important parties within the Catalan Countries such as Compromís or Més per Mallorca. It is what the Spanish right usually ridicules as the Frankenstein, a majority made of many pieces, supposedly of political corpses (cadaverism related to the civil war is an ingredient very present in the patriotic recipes of PP, Vox and derivatives). Someone can also speak of frontism, of a left-wing front against a right-wing front.

The German far-right is disguising itself as a lamb to win elections. Alternative for Germany (AfD) has changed the recipe with an image of hope to break its electoral ceiling, a turn that has allowed it to win elections in the eastern states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in just two weeks. The party has moved from the campaign slogan "Enough" from five years ago to "Everything is possible" and "Everything will be fine" in Saxony-Anhalt, a change in strategy with which the ultra-rightists move from a narrative denouncing the decline – which, in their view, Germany is experiencing – to selling optimism and enthusiasm. Fear and hope are combined in a perfect cocktail to reap electoral profit from the disenchantment that part of the population feels regarding the federal government of the traditional right-wing CDU and the social democrats of the SPD.

Far-right nationalist populist parties are leading the way everywhere, from Washington to Warsaw. Why, then, be so alarmed by the small electoral victories of one of these parties, Alternative for Germany (AfD)? “Because it’s Germany!” is the almost instinctive answer in many heads around the world.

What do the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), the German Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Bulgarian Vazrazhdane, the French National Rally, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), and the Spanish National Democracy or the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE) have in common? Some are far-right and others are far-left, but they share certain unequivocal attitudes: they are openly pro-Russian, and some have been funded with little dissimulation by the Kremlin. Some defend Putin's traditional/conservative values regarding the family, while others consider him the best ally against the United States. Of course, all of them oppose NATO, which is to say, they are in favor of unilateral disarmament like the one preached by the last dinosaurs of the USSR.The so-called “hybrid war” that Russia exerts against its Polish or Romanian neighbors—minimalist attacks, controlled explosions without casualties, targeted sabotage—responds to a logic perfectly coherent with the Kremlin's strategic tradition. These are not military operations in the classic sense, but rather a form of psychological and political erosion intended to fracture European cohesion by means of, among other mechanisms, formations like those I mentioned before. The goal is clear and simple—division—but its realization proves tortuous: in a Europe that, sooner or later, will have to rearm itself to guarantee its own security, any ambiguous episode can fuel internal dissent and hinder, or even prevent, decision-making.The model is by no means new. From the final years of Tsarism, those of the Rasputin era, to the USSR or the current Russian Federation, Moscow has successfully cultivated a specialty: poisoning, both informational and literal (they say Rasputin ended up being immune to cyanide; Litvinenko was not so lucky). The disinformation of the Soviet era—those campaigns of rumor-mongering and blatant infiltration into leftist Western media—was a weapon of attrition that sought to sow doubt about the reliability of democratic institutions.

Definitely, the authoritarian delirium that threatens democracies has moved to Europe. Meanwhile, in the United States, Donald Trump, with polls clearly on the decline, is losing his cool, probably unable to understand that the continued display of his indecency has ended up discomforting some of his own. There are reasons to think that Trump—despite still having two years left in office—has entered a downward slope. We will have objective data soon, when the midterm elections arrive, which, if the polls are not wrong, augur a serious defeat for the Republicans.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU has obtained the worst result in its history in regional elections this weekend in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. A "disaster" admitted by the chancellery and a humiliation for a Merz who, upon coming to power, promised to reverse the strength of a far-right that has been tailing him for some time. The popularity of Alternative for Germany, for the moment, has no ceiling. In Saxony-Anhalt it was on the verge of governing, for the first time, in a German state, and on Sunday it won the elections in the land of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, in eastern Germany, and came in third in Berlin. While Merz's political survival is increasingly threatened, the AfD continues to grow in the shadow of economic and industrial decline, which has slowed the German engine, and a feeling of insecurity that is fueled by the criminalization of rising immigration in the last decade. But, above all, the far-right has demonstrated a great capacity to exploit voters' disillusionment with the political establishment of the Grand Coalition.

Still in shock from the far-right victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt two weeks ago, Germany is taking the temperature of the ultra-wave this Sunday in the elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and also in Berlin. The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is looking to leverage the momentum of the victory in Saxony-Anhalt to try and repeat it in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the second eastern state to head to the polls. And it could succeed, although far from an absolute majority and with few options to govern. Polls give the AfD 37% of the votes, followed very closely by the Social Democrats, currently in government, with 35%.

Now that the Eleventh of September has passed and we have returned to talking about country, coexistence and a single people, a less solemn and more uncomfortable exercise is convenient. Let us imagine, for a moment, another Catalonia. Not an ideal country, but a country that would have understood that every arrival forced an update to the social pact. Immigration was not a passing emergency: it challenged the school, housing, work, language, rights and the very idea of citizenship.Let us imagine that governments had understood that welcoming is not just about registering, processing papers, or ritually celebrating diversity. Welcoming means ensuring that those who arrive can live with dignity, participate on equal terms, and define the shared country. It was necessary to abandon the vertical logic—some receive and others must show gratitude—and build a horizontal integration. Immigrant people would not have been treated only as a workforce or cultural difference, but as political subjects.Imagine if school segregation had been effectively combated, including in its racial dimension. We would not have centers that concentrate all the complexity while others remain on the sidelines. The children would have shared classrooms, playgrounds, and expectations; they would have grown up as equals, not learning that there are schools for those from here and for those from away. Perhaps today it would be harder to convince them that their neighbors are a threat.Imagine if housing had been considered a central immigration policy. That the public stock had been expanded and discrimination fought. Avoiding concentration would not have meant dispersing people, but rather distributing affordable housing, services, and opportunities throughout the territory. The problem is not that immigrant people live together, but that they can only live where inequality confines them.Let us imagine that it had not become normalized for a part of the population to remain trapped in the most precarious jobs. Qualifications would have been recognized and exploitation pursued. Work would have been a path to autonomy and recognition, not a permanent mechanism of subordination.Let us imagine a democratic secularism that guarantees, with the same criteria, the freedom to believe, not to believe, and to express one's convictions. A secularism capable of distinguishing the criticism of a doctrine from suspicion towards Muslim people. The problem is not debating Islam, but demanding that it demonstrate its compatibility with democracy and belonging to the country.