Santiago Abascal returns to Catalonia and does so to step on the gas in the operation to hunt for the coveted seat in Girona, a Catalanist stronghold that not even the PP has managed to secure since the elections fifteen years ago, with the victory of Mariano Rajoy. In an event at the city's Congress Palace, with the presence and public support of the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, characterized by his anti-Catalanism and for being a pillar of the far-right party National Rally, Abascal has set the priority of strengthening the demographic trends, surrounded by more than a thousand people. "A benchmark for all of us, a neighbor from very close by. Bienvenue à Gérone", said the provincial president of Girona, Alberto Tarradas, about Aliot, who spoke in Catalan in front of Abascal, just like the head of the list for the constituency, the former Platform for Catalonia member Ignasi Mulleras. "Common sense and locals first," the three defended.

The Revolt broke its million-viewer record with Abascal, but the show was not a success. On the contrary. If you make an entertainment show, you must entertain; you cannot make people suffer. Terrified that it might be said he had ended up empathizing with the leader of Vox, Broncano renounced the laughter, which is the same as saying he renounced doing his show.

From time to time, in Brussels, I watch La revuelta, on RTVE Internacional. The other day Pedro Almodóvar was there and Broncano took the opportunity to announce that the following Monday Santiago Abascal, from Vox, would go on the show. I thought the interview would be interesting, and yesterday I watched it. It was interesting, very much so. It was a great lesson, not primarily in politics, but in anthropology and history. Anthropology, dictionaries say, is “the study of human beings in an integral way, encompassing both their biological and evolutionary dimension and their cultural and social diversity over time”. There, on La revuelta, there were two perfect archetypes of what has been, for time immemorial, the history of Spain. Those on top and those on the bottom. Those who have dominated and those who are dominated. Abascal represented the first archetype perfectly, “impasible el ademán”, with answers for everything without any shadow of doubt or hesitation, allowing himself the luxury of a “campechana” bonhomie, with pats on the back and some paternal and affectionate pinches. It takes a few generations to obtain this human type.

A 33.6% of viewers opted yesterday to watch the interview with Santiago Abascal on La1. These are figures that remain three tenths below the 33.9% that Pedro Sánchez achieved a few days earlier with his participation in La revuelta. Mind you, if looking at the number of viewers, the Vox leader achieved 4.8 million while the socialist remained at 4.4 million. In Catalonia, Abascal was followed by 31.9% of the audience and 589,000 viewers, while Sánchez remained at 571,000 followers and a 33.0% share.

Last night's interview on TVE's La Revuelta went much better for Abascal than for Broncano. The Vox leader listened, kept quiet, did not interrupt, and responded when it was his turn. And he responded in a reasonably responsible tone. Broncano, on the other hand, made very long interventions with clarifications that no one was asking for and that sounded like excuses, and he managed neither to make an entertaining show (we are talking about an entertainment program) nor to conduct a poignant interview. To put it in sporting terms, Abascal won. And he will gain some votes, thanks to this interview, because many people watched it: it was the most-watched broadcast in the history of the program in terms of viewers, nearly five million people, 428,000 more viewers than the one with Pedro Sánchez.

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.

In October 2019, during a conversation with Gerard Piqué on La resistencia, the footballer asked David Broncano: "Would you bring Abascal on your show?" "No, I wouldn't," the presenter replied, following the controversy over Pablo Motos' interview with Abascal on El hormiguero a few days earlier. Seven years later, the Vox candidate for the general election appeared this Monday on La revuelta. And he has become the star of the most-watched interview in the show's history, with an average audience of 4,815,000 viewers and a 33.6% audience share.

I do not know if there is full awareness of the importance of the challenge that American society has posed to Donald Trump. The capitulation of the Republican Party to Trumpist delusions has cost it dearly. And a good portion of its voters have crossed the dividing line: voters are human beings—therefore, there are all kinds of them—but they still retain a certain level of sensitivity and perception, and they are capable of being outraged when a government loses the notion of boundaries and acts with total impunity. Trump cannot understand this because his miserable ego is desperately in need of recognition. But the defeat has been so monumental that it seems unlikely he could choose to push forward by breaking the rules of the game. Given the reaction of the citizenry, it is hard to believe that the institutions would allow themselves to be contaminated. Americans have set the limits of what is possible. And Trump has been left disoriented. Out of dignity, he should go home. Recognize his lack of sense of reality. He will not do it; he will hardly be able to understand why so many people have reacted against his delusions and wanted to save the institutions before democracy declined.

The 2.9 million clients of Ueno Bank, one of the most popular financial institutions in Paraguay, are experiencing the uncertainty of a corralito that has blocked their savings and pensions. The bank's collapse has simultaneously caused an earthquake in the country's government, given the business ties of President Santiago Peña, who has resigned, with the bank. These links have triggered an impeachment trial against the far-right leader, a friend and ally of Vox leader in Spain, Santiago Abascal. A tweet from the president's daughter, Constanza Peña, wearing a t-shirt calling for taxes to be imposed on the poor, has also sparked controversy.

Almost 400 podcast episodes later, a resident of the Bages region could hold one of the keys to connecting with the youth vote in the next general elections. Jordi Wild, or Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz Torres (Manresa, 1984), has turned The Wild Project into one of the benchmark podcasts in the digital ecosystem in Spanish. Now, a few weeks before the elections, the content creator has managed to get Pedro Sánchez, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, Ada Colau, and Santiago Abascal to agree to step up to his microphones. The four interviews will be published on November 13, in a gamble that places a youtuber at the center of the communication strategy of the main candidates for Moncloa.

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.

Following Junts' vote against the two housing decrees, Rufián asserted that he would strive to ensure that Junts ends up in "the greatest political ostracism." Later, on social media, he considered them "fucking classists" and Turull retorted by saying that everyone knows that Rufián is "an invention of the State's sewers, infiltrated first in Súmate and then in Esquerra." And yesterday, on TVE, Colau said that Puigdemont "will have problems walking through Catalonia because he will encounter a very angry citizenry" due to Junts' opposing vote on the decrees.

Joy on the right over Pedro Sánchez's decision to call early elections. Both the PP and Vox have applauded the announcement for November 29, which they see as the definitive opportunity to end the Sanchista era. "Finally, we can close this chapter," celebrated Alberto Núñez Feijóo in an institutional statement at the Popular Party headquarters shortly after the Spanish Prime Minister's announcement. The PP leader has been waiting for years for a second chance to reach La Moncloa after his failed attempt in 2023, and has positioned these new polls as a transcendental occasion in which much more will be done "than choosing between two parties." "This is about making Spain defeat Sánchez and what he represents," proclaimed Feijóo, who urged citizens to decide "if they want four more years of what we are living through or if they want to give change a chance." However, the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has gone a step further and has once again fueled the ghost of electoral fraud.

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, has decided to begin the electoral pre-campaign for the Spanish elections in Catalonia. He had not come since the 2024 Catalan elections, but the political scene is beginning to be mature enough to think that Pedro Sánchez may soon press the electoral button. This Thursday he passed through Lleida and on Friday he was in Tarragona and Barcelona. "Abascal is starting the pre-campaign in Catalonia because of the importance it holds and above all because it is one of the places where there is the most room for growth along with Ceuta, Murcia, and Valencia". This is how Vox sources consulted by ARA defend this strategic choice, and they argue that among the factors for the surge is the support captured from traditionally socialist areas and the dual vote with Aliança Catalana, which, they point out, benefits them significantly in the general elections. In this context, Abascal stated from the Catalan capital that unity is needed between "Catalans and Castilians" to fight against Islam –similar to what he said in Lleida.

As it could not be otherwise, the illiberal wave sweeping the world has set its sights on the right to vote. Voting with freedom of conscience is surely the most relevant civic act, the most transcendent right that a citizen can exercise. Ballot boxes identify democracies, even though authoritarian regimes falsify them to disguise themselves as democracies: Putin's Russia, for example. But the vote, and specifically the manipulation of the vote for one's own electoral benefit, is the dark object of desire for authoritarian politicians and rulers. They usually accuse others of engaging in it, because when they are in power they indulge in it gluttonously.The temptation to tamper with votes is sharpening. In Argentina, Milei has promoted an electoral reform that, if it goes ahead, will completely redesign the rules of the democratic game from top to bottom. Among other things, the chainsaw man proposes that electoral campaigns not be paid for by the state, but rather sponsored by individuals and companies, and he also wants to eliminate presidential debates and even the mandatory primaries within parties.Trump has turned manipulations regarding the vote into a raison d'être for his policies, starting with the fact of having instigated the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a supposed rebellion against no less supposed fraudulent elections (which he had lost and Biden had won). Trump has likewise fueled the suspicion of fraud regarding the midterm elections in the month of November (and he will intensify it as they approach, because he fears losing them), and a few days ago, at a convention in Dallas, in the middle of an erratic and decadent speech, he wanted to cast a lure: five thousand dollars for every adult American citizen in the event that the Republicans win the elections. A promise like this is indecent, illegal, and obviously unachievable, but the shot has already been fired: it is about putting a price on the vote and treating it as just another commodity.In the Spanish state, the Supreme Court has just provisionally halted the so-called “law of grandchildren” to prevent the voting rights of the descendants of Spanish citizens who had to go into exile during the Franco dictatorship. This is equivalent to taking the right to vote away from more than four hundred thousand Spanish citizens, with the argument –wielded by the high court without any attempt to hide it– that their participation in the elections could “alter the result desired by the Spaniards” in the polls. The “desired result,” in case anyone has lost track, is for the sum of PP and Vox to win the elections. Since we mention it, Santiago Abascal's party has proposed more than once (and broad sectors of the PP view it favorably) to modify the electoral law so that “minorities” cannot run in elections as they have done until now, nor “impose their will” in Congress or the Senate. This, in case anyone has lost track as well, is aimed at the left-wing parties, and also at the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties.

That Vox returns to govern in four autonomous communities, in coalition with the PP, is one of the novelties of this political year. After the elections in Extremadura, Aragon, Castilla y León, and Andalusia, the balance for the far-right is that it has obtained four vice-presidencies of autonomous executives, to which five more ministries must be added. This has meant a new strategic turn for Santiago Abascal's party after the decision to abandon governmental responsibilities two years ago. The opposition stage to the Popular Party, which has seen Vox's electoral growth, has given way to a new phase in which the party is committed to governing. The possibility now opens up for them to apply their policies in the areas they have secured from negotiations with the PP, such as agriculture, livestock, forest management, social services, family, tourism, culture, and, newly created applying their own framework, deregulation.

The Spanish government has prepared to welcome a ship with people infected with hantavirus to the Canary Islands, and the baser passions of the right-wing parties have been unleashed. Without any contribution or information about a case that is in the hands of the health authorities, they have focused on the crude speculation with the memory of the incomparable and painful episode of covid. Anything goes to take advantage of the situation. But one thing is to play politics and another is to play politics by seeking to instill fear in citizens without any justification, only to weaken the adversary. A formula that demonstrates the poor awareness of politics and the scant consideration for people. A move that could backfire on them.

Fascism is a sentimental issue. It arises, above all, from certain masculine sentiments. Economic, social, and cultural causes can be sought, but it is fundamentally the collective expression of a series of personal frustrations.

Orbán, the friend of Trump and Putin, a figurehead of the European far-right, a Trojan horse in the European Union, has fallen resoundingly at the polls. Let his continental imitators and those who whitewash them and aspire to deal with him take note. Here the imitators are called Orriols and Abascal. Perhaps people are starting to be fed up with discourses of hate, division, and confrontation. With hopeless, enraged, and fatalistic shouting. With "everything is shit." With those who, instead of proposing viable solutions to very serious structural problems, look for enemies under every stone every day, magnify them, feed them. With those who fuel chaos, like Trump does.

The expulsion of Javier Ortega Smith was the trigger that has allowed Vox's critics to light the fuse against the leadership. The definitive coup de grâce was on February 18, when the party kicked out the former Madrid leader, who, this time, has decided to go to war that he avoided during the January 2024 congress. This rebellion was followed by the Murcian leader, José Ángel Antelo, after the leadership offered him to be a regional candidate on the condition that he leave the provincial presidency, which he did not accept and was expelled from the group with an expediente to be eliminated. Vox's former spokesperson Iván Espinosa de los Monteros –who stepped down in August 2023 and already launched a foundation to influence last September–, joined in, activating the call for an extraordinary congress. And the resignation of the former Castilian-Leonese vice-president Juan García-Gallardo has also been added, who stepped down in February of last year. A series of movements that show the critics' offensive against the leadership of Santiago Abascal.