It's all a matter of branding. I thought so on Tuesday, seeing the images of the King and Queen of Spain and their daughters watching the World Cup match against France, dressed in the team's second kit, the white Adidas jersey. Apparently, this model sold out before the team's debut in the tournament and has demonstrated the success of the nineties' design, somewhere between melancholic and second-hand shop, and the success, above all, of having renounced the flag's colors and replaced the blood red with a very pleasant burgundy. I also thought so because, seeing fans with the rojigualda wrapped around their bodies like a second skin, a rejection awoke in me that the white jersey managed to appease. I have read some articles that argue that Spain, unlike the United States, maintains a peculiar relationship with its own symbols, an appreciation that I find false: you only need to get off the AVE at Atocha to realize the categorical and unequivocal presence of national iconography.The triumph of the t-shirt, in my opinion, lies in this making Spain seem like something different from Spain. Quite iconic, in fact, that the solution is white, because that way someone could talk about "whitewashing" and pat themselves on the back, but I certainly think this successful strategy captures a global trend: making things not seem like what they are. Let me explain. On the one hand, there is the casualness with which patriotic discourses, constitutional or not, are imposed in public spaces today (in my gym, a guy shows up every day with a t-shirt of theaguilucho, and everyone is so calm), and on the other hand, there is the desperation of those who do not want to resemble this, but whose alternative proposal is more cosmetic, aesthetic, than anything else: putting on the white t-shirt allows for articulating a kind of liminal space, opening up a fleeting disidentification, making it seem for a while that things are not as they are. It paradoxically deals with maintaining the background with a new form that promises a new background. However, over time, this new form becomes fixed, and once everyone has swallowed the renewed symbol, there is no need to redo anything: Spain wears white, but it remains Spain.I find that something similar has happened with Aliança Catalana, which hides textbook racism under a protectionist discourse that argues that public services should be reserved exclusively for nationals: even though Orriols sometimes shows herself to be radical, anointed with impunity to express any opinion (a few days ago she referred to the veil as "headscarf"), she also oscillates with more diplomatic discourses that she articulates to distance herself from what the population associates with Vox. However, when one discovers that 22% of Aliança Catalana voters will choose Vox in the general elections one realizes that, even though Orriols dresses in white, even though she appeals to a millennial Catalan identity and a history of persecution and survival, she shares more dreams with Ignacio Garriga than with Abbot Oliba.All of this, I suppose, is to say that there are things that are unreformable, and exacerbated patriotism is one of them. And that, faced with the impossibility of making people believe that the Spanish flag represents a single good thing, it is better to drag it, that is, to pass it off as some form of transformism, and to pretend that it is no longer there, that it has melted away: that it is now white. It is similar to the cry of the Javis after winning Cannes with a film about the Civil War: "¡Viva España!" I know what they meant (long live another Spain, a republican, antifascist, queer, plural Spain...), but there is a certain naivety: their cry, however renewed they want it to be, is still exclusionary. And the truth is that, for many people, the problem is not that the idea of Spain is obsolete, but that the problem is the very idea of Spain, reformed or not, with a white shirt or red and yellow. I mean: if the kings wear the second kit, there must be a reason for it.

This Saturday, a handful of masked men from a recognized supremacist group marched through Washington shouting "Reclaim America!". The gathering —held as the US capital prepared for the main events of its 250th anniversary— was brief and, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police Department, they left the city shortly before 11 a.m.

What has become of European social democracy? It is shocking that Spain is one of its last strongholds. What is the reason for this generalized decline that is giving life to the expansion of the far-right and which finds no compensation in the space to the left of socialists, who are still experiencing this situation with even more bewilderment? Are we to understand that the role of social democracy was one of counterbalance during industrial capitalism, within the framework of European democracies of the last century, and that now it cannot find its place in the new financial and digital capitalism? It is evident that the meaning of words and things changes, and that the mutation of the criteria of truth and virtue that shape each moment has an impact on the ways a society organizes itself. But the role of social democracy was fundamental, and its weakness is noticeable. And what is disturbing is that, while social democracy fades, blatant forms of authoritarian impulses are gaining ground everywhere, with a clear shift towards right-wing radicalization that exponentially propagates neo-fascist impulses.

A few days ago, the group Fades announced via Instagram that they had to cancel the concert in Vilassar de Mar on June 23 after several people in the audience threw ice cubes onto the stage during the performance. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain the motive for an assault, but intuition rarely fails to determine its origin: in this case, it could be hatred of the queer expression they embody or the defense they champion of the Catalan language and culture. They can also know this because they constantly receive, daily, threats of this kind through social networks. The next day, many media outlets reported the news and, like the group's own statement, linked the assault to the rise of the far-right.I am now writing these lines with many doubts. Firstly because far right has become a term as imprecise and worn out as mental health, housing crisis or neoliberalism. We use it constantly thinking we know what we are referring to, but it barely denotes any certainty. We could imagine the profile of a person who threatens a music group on social media or who, later, assaults them during a concert: it could be someone who has meditated the attack; someone who, in an improvised way, has felt confident enough to start throwing ice cubes; someone who has made violence a form of seduction; someone who has let themselves be carried away by their environment, in a kind of initiatory ritual that involves hatred of difference. Some must be militants of the far right and must agree, without cracks, with their political imaginary. It would be wonderful if that were the case, in fact: we would know who they are, what they think, what they want. It happens, however, and I am sure, that many of them are not followers of Vox or Aliança Catalana: perhaps they follow incel gurus on the internet, perhaps they feel infinite frustration, perhaps they only know how to express some feeling if it is from phobia and aversion, perhaps they are resentful uneducated people or perhaps they are fans of the new retrograde centennial binarism. No idea. I am not writing now to understand who they are, what they think, what they want. What I believe unites them all, those who now insult and later will call for raids, is a severe sense of legitimacy in the public agora, and here lies, in my opinion, one of our great challenges. They all feel that they can do it as they could not do it a few years ago, that they have finally recovered a freedom lost by political correctness and leftist do-goodism, by the progressive feminist agenda that, according to them, has gone against their well-being. Extreme right aside, the war, here, is about discourse and language: there are those who believe that their truths can now be expressed with sovereignty, freedom, and a broad approach. They can take the floor because no one disputes it, they can occupy the space as they please because there is no one left defending it.I was ruminating on these things when, a few days ago, while this was just happening in Vilassar, I was having dinner with a publisher in the Pyrenees who told me, convinced, that one of the evils of our time is that we who dedicate ourselves to the word (writers, publishers, poets, journalists...) do not take it. We censor reprehensible conduct with some quick tweet, a brief article (like this one) and little else. And lucky, in fact, if we do. Many times we are stopped by self-censorship, fear, imposed shame, paralysis. Thus, the feeling widens that the public agora, where discourses are found, where bodies are found, is empty, desolate, ready to be paved with the cobblestones of hate. What I wonder, today too, is what would happen if, in cases like this, instead of the organizers reading a manifesto after the aggression and some media publishing the news, feigning dismay, a group of people surrounded the aggressors, denounced them or, simply, with the desire to take the word, to reclaim common space, and much more effectively, broke their legs. But we won't do it, of course.

"Dark Lights" is the name that Arnaud Miranda, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, in a recent book, gives to the new neo-reactionary thought that threatens Europe and democracies in general in this epochal shift that is the transition from industrial to financial and digital capitalism.

When this evening, in all corners of the Catalan Countries, the fire of the Flame of Canigó arrives, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands will still be under the governmental binomials of PP and Vox, the xenophobic arsonists will be accumulating firewood in the Principality with the intention of lighting it soon and in North Catalonia, months ago the far-right – from Perpignan to Elna – imposed themselves in the first round. Their uncontrolled fires – where everything burns, from language to country, from biodiversity to the future – are not ours. But surrounded by the global far-right wave, perhaps from up there – the walls of the monastery of Cuixà, let's say – they will be able to tell us in perspective that if we get right what needs to be done, we have come out of worse situations, when they have seen it all. For example, that only 50 years ago we still lived under a dictatorship, there was no trace of democratic elections and death sentences were signed. Perhaps they will remind us that everything goes very fast when it comes to dismantling what has been built and everything goes exasperatingly slow when it comes to moving forward. In form and substance, no news. Not a single one. That some things mutate rapidly and others never change. That the bank wins and the State wins. Almost always.Last Saturday, Marc Castellnou, from the GRAF of the Generalitat Firefighters, said that fires are very good teachers but very bad students. For decades he has also told us that fires are extinguished in winter and that our ecosystem concentrates the fourteen possible types of fires – that is, all existing options. And that after years of turning a deaf ear, we are now beginning to pay attention to what has not been done and what still remains to be done. It is quite eloquent to apply the three fire-fighting maxims of the firefighters to the accelerated devaluation of democracy in the era of global fires. Which range from the Strait of Hormuz to a nihilistic billionaire in Colombia, from a shooting on Balmes street to the mass eviction of a building in La Mina this week, from devastated Gaza to German and Japanese rearmament, from Infantino's corrupt World Cup to Musk's tweet about Belfast – or Albiol's in Badalona. Fires provoked everywhere by the scorched earth profiteers. However, it was not they who left the land barren and the undergrowth neglected. Three maxims: that we do not learn, that what needed to be done has not been done, and that anything can happen on the ultra-revell that ignites the world.

Faced with the rise of the far-right indicated by all polls, not only are left-wing parties trying to find a way to contain it, but the country's social and economic fabric is also mobilizing. This is the case of the UGT, which this week launched an anti-fascist campaign under the slogan "Who wins when hate advances?" The union alerts the working class to the racist and hateful discourse of parties like Vox and Aliança Catalana, as they warn that they do not "offer solutions to the real problems of citizens." "Voting for the far-right is not harmless, it has consequences for rights," points out the general secretary of the UGT, Camil Ros, in statements to ARA.

The award-winning documentary series by Raül Gallego, Punt de no retorn, premieres its third season on June 22. It will be available on the 3Cat platform from Monday. Each episode will be forty minutes long and will continue to give visibility to current conflicts. L'ARA spoke with Gallego at the beginning of last year and, in the interview, the director explained the origin of the series, the choice of topics for the episodes, or the author's ability to approach extreme situations and people suffering the consequences of conflicts. But one of the achievements that the Catalan director probably did not imagine reaching at the beginning of the production was winning the International Emmy for Best Short-Form Series in 2024 and the Online Journalism Awards, in the digital short-form video storytelling category.

After decades of what was known as "Iberian exceptionalism" – the absence of radical right-wing formations in the peninsula's parliaments – this political spectrum has not only burst into the Parliament of Catalonia, but has done so twice over. A study by the Institute of Political and Social Sciences (ICPS), published this Wednesday, thoroughly analyzes the rise of Vox and Aliança Catalana (AC), two parties that, despite defending diametrically opposed national projects, are primarily fueled by the same electoral driver: rejection of immigration.The ICPS study challenges the idea that the growth of these parties is solely due to polarization and the management of the independence process. While the territorial conflict created the right climate for Vox, led by Ignasi Garriga, to enter Parliament in 2021 and Catalan Alliance, led by Sílvia Orriols, to do so in 2024, the real driving force behind both electorates is structural. Both parties fully exploit "welfare chauvinism," a strategy that advocates for public services to be reserved exclusively for "nationals." Both the party led by Santiago Abascal and Sílvia Orriols' party agree in their platforms to associate immigration and crime, demand the deportation of irregular immigrants and the expulsion of unaccompanied foreign minors (MENA), and call for drastic measures to expedite the eviction of squatters. Economically, they also go hand in hand: they propose fiscal cuts, the abolition of taxes such as inheritance and gift tax and wealth tax, criticize excessive public spending, and generally call for a strong boost to free market policies.

There are historical moments when certain political tendencies seem to impose themselves unstoppably, as if carried by a gust of wind. A few years ago, the rise of the far-right was unthinkable; it is true that the disasters of the 20th century are now far away for the new generations, but we have seen enough films and heard so much talk about Hitlerian madness and the dictatorship that long oppressed us that it seemed impossible that anyone could still believe that those slogans were desirable and could improve collective life. And yet, we have seen how the wave has been spreading across Europe, how it has devoured the United States, how it is rising among us, perhaps to engulf us too. We have many explanations for why this has happened. The easiest and most trivial is the one that attributes it to the errors of left-wing parties, to corruption scandals, to internal squabbles. All of this is certainly present, but they are minor issues when compared to everything that the left has achieved since the Transition: free healthcare and education systems, pensions, redistribution of income through political action. Everything that is at risk when the far-right arrives; this, initially supported by populist proposals, always changes when it has already achieved power, with a coup d'état if necessary, if it sees its dominion threatened. And then the party is over, it is repression that settles in, and, unfortunately, sometimes for many years. Is it inevitable that in Spain the next government will be PP+Vox, a combination that could be terrible, and that will once again turn Catalonia into the favorite enemy, along with immigration? Can the left-wing parties do anything to prevent it? I think, at this moment, this is a key question: I don't know if we have time to avoid disaster, but, at least, we should try.

For a long time, the debate has revolved around the question of what explains the rise of the far right. Last Sunday's ARA dedicated In the rest of Europe, this correlation between the far right and immigration is also not found. This is the conclusion of the French demographer Hervé Le Bras in his book El gran engaño (Editorial Hacer, 2024), where he compares the relationship between populism and immigration in six European countries (Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom) and the United States. According to Le Bras, this correlation can even be inverse, meaning that the less immigration there is, the more votes for the far right. There are not a few examples: in Germany, immigrants are in the west, while far-right votes are concentrated mainly in the east. In the United States, Trump wins in the Midwest and the Deep South, which is precisely where immigrants are least present. While in France and Italy there does seem to be some correlation in regional terms, when we go down to the local level, this relationship disappears.According to Le Bras, this unequal distribution of votes for the far-right is mainly explained by the divide between the countryside and the city. For example, in France, in the 2017 elections, 32% of voters in municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants opted for Marine Le Pen, while this percentage dropped to 12% in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and 5% in Paris. It is the same divide we saw in the United Kingdom with the Brexit referendum, where urban areas were predominantly against it and rural areas in favor.

The ideological frameworks of the xenophobic right are making inroads into the political mainstream. Not so much due to the growth of Aliança Catalana as to the way its discourse is contaminating the rest of the party landscape. This is not unrelated to a moral victory for the far-right, but it also means that parties have decided not to turn their backs on an issue that people consider important, such as immigration management. And they do so by sweetening the most aggressive proposals of Sílvia Orriols' party.It is a similar process (with apologies for the comparison) to what the left has done with environmentalism, which was previously a ridiculed cause and labeled as hippy, until science made everyone realize that it was a matter of paramount importance. The posthumous victory of the green parties was not their hegemony, but the assumption of their ideology by the left – and part of the right – throughout the West.I don't think Aliança Catalana will conquer the central lane of Catalanism, but a part of its ideology, which is largely racist and fascistoid, will be integrated into the ideological corpus of the democratic right (in a format acceptable to its voters) and, finally, perhaps, by the left. The first step has been to accept that immigration is a problem, a challenge that should be presented as a socioeconomic issue and not in cultural or moral terms. This makes it easier to swallow.The debate now is not about races or cultures, but about the economic model: unchecked growth and the strain on public services. On these issues, the conclusion reached by economists (like the signatories of the Informe Fènix) is that Catalonia depends excessively on tourism, which gentrifies and saturates the territory, and furthermore encourages the massive import of cheap labor, which does not help sustain the welfare state. Immigration, therefore, is only beneficial for a part of the Catalan productive fabric (not only tourism, but also the agri-food industry), which exploits it and underpays it in exchange for collapsing public services. This approach, which disregards skin colors, religions, and burqas, makes the demographic debate more accessible to the majority forces.But the migratory debate is not only making headway through technification. The identity issue is reviving. Like any small nation, Catalans fear their dissolution, the sacrifice of their culture on the altar of globalization. At the same time, certain progressivism, while condemning racism and aporophobia, attacks tourists, expats, the mafias that hide behind the swarm of supermarkets and souvenir shops, and the vulture funds, which “merserve” our rejection because they are in a position of power with respect to the defenseless neighbors who have to abandon their neighborhood, the traditional commerce that closes its doors, the Catalan that disappears from the streets. It is a kind of progressive, tolerable xenophobia, where the weak is no longer the one who arrives but the one who welcomes.The problem is that, even though we point to a different enemy, the battle is very similar to the one defended by the far-right (first those from home, rejection of diversity, defense of values and autochthonous culture). We are opening a crack through which toxic ideas can infiltrate. While remembering that the ills of the Catalan production model are not only the fault of outsiders; they are, above all, the fault of the natives who exploit them.In this context, we must ensure that this ideological conversion serves a good purpose (disarming the far-right and bravely facing a real debate) and does not provide moral cover for racism. For this reason, it is very important to frame the debate and place it in the hands of wise people vaccinated against ethnic prejudice.

The United Kingdom has had six prime ministers in the last ten years. That is, since David Cameron's failure with his Brexit referendum defeat, the country has settled into political instability that has been liquidating leaderships and majorities. Today, the Labour leader Keir Starmer is a deeply unpopular prime minister, questioned by his own party and by the electorate, for not having lived up to the leadership that his colleagues demanded nor to the expectations of improving living standards that the British needed. Starmer inherited a country fractured by Brexit, which never fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and which today faces again the risk of recession due to the consequences of the war in Iran. 79% of British adults declare themselves concerned about the rising cost of living compared to the previous month, and especially about the rising price of food. In this context, the electoral victory of Nigel Farage's Reform UK in the local elections on May 7 has been explained as the victory of resentment, and the British press has begun to analyze the supposed "ungovernability" of the country. But the crisis that the United Kingdom is experiencing is not exceptional. It is the portrait of a fragility that runs through Europe. The agonizing end of macronism is the clearest example.

In the next municipal elections, as always, there will be movements on the electoral map. One of those that can already be clearly anticipated is the emergence of Aliança Catalana (AC) in many town halls, which will significantly alter the map of majorities. The far-right formation already made an appearance in 2023 with the mayorship of Ripoll, and some lists in other places. But if we pay attention to the trajectory indicated by the 2024 Parliament elections, what the polls say, and what the party's progressive territorial expansion suggests, that was just the beginning. With the data we have today, we can practically take for granted that next year the xenophobic party will have representation and an important role in many municipalities.

In broad daylight and on the city promenade, in September 2023, several young people threw tables and chairs at each other in a pitched battle that ended up being a kind of turning point in Manresa. That episode caused several residents to take to the streets to demand measures against "insecurity" in the street from the municipal government, led by the republican Marc Aloy. That demonstration, however, was already born divided, and some groups directly distanced themselves from it so as not to link insecurity with immigration. This is, in fact, the fragile balance in which Manresa, a city of 80,000 inhabitants with almost 22% of people from abroad, has been moving for some years.

Balaguer was the capital of the powerful county of Urgell and provided rulers such as King Peter III the Ceremonious, but that is a distant memory. The degradation of the historic center and social segregation mark a city with dwindling vitality. In the center and around the church of Santa Maria de Balaguer, ruined houses, half-demolished or illegally occupied, show the complexity of the capital of La Noguera, with 17,700 inhabitants, which is not even connected to the highway – the C-13 to link it with Lleida is just a promise, and this makes them lose industrial momentum.

Vic has exceeded the 50,000 inhabitants threshold for the first time. It has gained 20,000 in the last thirty years, representing an approximate increase of 66%, double the Catalan average in the same period. The region's omnipresent agri-food industry, especially the meat sector, is a magnet for foreign labor, which already accounts for 30% of the population, more than half of whom are of African origin.

Following the regional elections in Andalusia, there has been much talk again about the far-right's attempts to seize power. One of the tactics to achieve this – not only in Spain but also in other countries like the United States or our neighbor France – consists of trying to dominate the media, the more massive the better, with the aim of influencing society's beliefs or the collective imagination. This tactic is part of the “cultural war,” which seeks to impose a hegemonic way of thinking. Societies are plural, and the free expression of differences in political, ideological, religious positions, etc., is a symptom of democratic health. It is revealing, however, that lately it is the anti-democratic right that invokes freedom of expression as a weapon in this “war,” while when it is in power, what it does is eliminate all dissident discourse.In France, a scandal occurred a few weeks ago in the cultural sphere that is still causing a great deal of uproar. The circumstance that caused it seems trivial: the Algerian writer of French expression Boualem Sansal (a candidate for the Nobel Prize for years), who had been imprisoned for months for political reasons in his country and was released thanks to international pressure, decided to change publishers. So far, everything suggests that this is a personal and not at all reprehensible decision, but the problem is that the publishing house Grasset, which will publish his next book —a chronicle of his stay in prison, with the ambition of a bestseller”— is in the hands of the Bolloré group. The founder and owner of this holding company, which includes several well-known periodicals and television channels such as Canal+, is the millionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has openly declared himself in favor of leading a "civilizing project" based on the ideals of the far-right and the most rancid Catholicism.

Sant Blai street has historically been one of the most commercial in Tortosa and well illustrates the changes the city has undergone in recent years. In the capital of Baix Ebre live about 36,000 people, 23.5% of whom are of foreign origin. Many of the immigrants work in the fields or run small establishments in the city. This is the case of Oman, who opened a restaurant on Sant Blai street a year and a half ago, the Luxury Rif. It is flanked by a call shop, on one side, and a kebab shop, a few meters away. A neighbor enters and asks if he minds if he orders something to eat. Oman, who is in the middle of Ramadan when we do this report, says no. "We are here, working hard," he explains about the business, where traditional Moroccan food is served. Moroccans are the foreign population group with the most weight in the region: they represent 30% of foreigners, according to Idescat data.

Catalonia concentrates such a diversity and complexity that it is a kind of Port Aventura of politics, where you have everything multiplied by two and sometimes apparently contradictory processes intertwine.