If the climatic trend is the same as this summer's, it is likely that we will have a warm autumn, but not hot in the usual journalistic sense. For various reasons, these types of heatwaves are over. A few days ago, a friend of my generation and I were recalling the politically torrid autumns of the Transition and comparing them to the current apathy. We were twelve or thirteen years old, and everything was boiling: factories, universities, neighborhoods, the media. Nothing was certain, however; even the boiling itself was often ambiguous. Exactly half a century ago, in 1976, the dictatorship still existed, but society ignored it as much as it could. Everyone did it in their own way, obviously, but almost no one trusted the viability of that rickety artifact, which, in appearance, was already outdated. Fifty years later, this is perhaps the fundamental key to understanding that period: Franco's death had left a void that the Arias Navarro government did not know how to fill in any way. The kleptocracy remained intact, parties were still prohibited, strikes were illegal, and the police were handing out beatings right and left. Strengthened by years of clandestine struggle, the labor movement turned 1976 into a year of great labor conflict. Without wanting to idealize anything, it is true that there were massive assemblies in the factories, that neighborhood committees articulated social demands, that the university was already out of control de facto... The feeling was that society was moving faster than the government. In any case, the memory of the Vitoria massacre on March 3, with five workers dead, loomed over any protest. The so-called Platajunta, which brought together the main opposition forces, achieved unprecedented political coordination and turned social pressure into a real negotiating force. Viewed with fifty years of perspective, however, that somewhat forced unity led to the pact of forgetting. It began to take shape right then, and it contained several political time bombs that would eventually explode decades later. To confirm this with a simple brushstroke: the founder of the party that very soon may govern Spain hand in hand with Vox, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, was the Minister of the Interior on that fateful March 3...

This is the last analysis of the season and, therefore, it is time to take stock. If we talk about moods, we arrive at the holidays worried because many folders have not been closed: the amnesty has not yet reached the exiles or the main disqualified individuals, the new financing system is very slow, almost as slow as the improvement of the Rodalies service or the Adif works, and the education system in Catalonia, which left for the holidays amidst strikes and will begin equally amidst protests, has hit rock bottom with the discrediting of the Department of Education and the lamentable final episode of the PISA tests. It only remains for us to know that the ministry warned the department in April 2025 (and not, as had been said, in March 2026), that there was a very high student exclusion rate, but the warning went from technicians to technicians and they did not communicate it to the top of the political sphere. Why? It is not known and this fuels suspicions that since the results of the tests would be very bad, no one wanted to take responsibility for the hot potato. In fact, the explanations were given at the end of July, late and poorly, and it is all a jumble of inconcisions about departments that were being reformed or the coincidence with other tests. All this does not generate confidence.It has been a year of protests in education, healthcare, and farming. Social discontent related to the loss of purchasing power has continued to grow. Because unemployment has fallen to pre-2008 crisis levels and everyone has a job, but salaries don't cover the end of the month. Housing is a pipe dream, while we hear about the construction of thousands of social and affordable rental apartments by the Generalitat. To be fair, these are measures that can generate a sustained supply for all budgets, but of course, apartments are not built overnight.We are checking the effects of the enormous demographic growth that Catalonia has experienced in the last 25 years. Those of us who are of a certain age still remember the announcement of "we are 6 million", and today we have already passed 8 and some are talking about 10. The seams of the country have burst everywhere and subsumed by common regime autonomous policies, we do not have the necessary fiscal and budgetary sovereignty to make a country tailor-made for us. That state investments in Catalonia in 2025 were 8.6% is outrageous. A consequence of this panorama is the electoral boom that Catalan Alliance will experience next year in the municipal elections according to all the polls, a boom that would announce a surpassing in the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia which, if not brought forward, would be in the spring of 2028. There is citizen exhaustion, a loss of confidence in the usual parties and leaderships, the ghost of existential linguistic anguish has reappeared and we have not fully recovered from the Process's Dragon Khan. If we add to this the great capacity of the far-right to turn the most primary identity drives into votes, the demographic future indicates that in Catalonia the same thing will end up happening that has already happened in other places in Europe and the world.The country has talent, it retains the knack for doing things well, it has reserves of self-esteem, and it has seen it all to be able to react to adversity. The country is more solid than it currently appears and it falters just as everyone falters. The problem is that it lacks the minimum sovereignty needed to make its own decisions. And for all of this, we go on vacation (and we are thankful for it) knowing that next season we will face the same problems and that the current solutions will fall short.Good summer and see you soon.

On August 29 and 30 – just a few days before teachers in Catalonia returned to their schools to prepare for the arrival of students this Monday–, more than 50 countries from around the world gathered in Chile to sign the Santiago Consensus, a historic agreement promoted by UNESCO.

It will not be a coincidence that the first chapter of the series School Stories TV3's program focuses on the problems of coexistence in a public school, showing live the insults, sexism, and contempt among students. We see the panic attack of a girl whom the boys in her class call a "whore." fat", and the teacher's helplessness in the face of the teenagers' indifference.

It will not be a coincidence that the first chapter of the series School Stories TV3's program focuses on the problems of coexistence in a public school, showing live the insults, sexism, and contempt between male and female students. fat", and the teacher's helplessness in the face of the teenagers' indifference.

Clotilde Leguil is a psychoanalyst, philosopher, professor at the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 8. She has written The age of toxicity (NED Editions), an essay that addresses the new malaise in civilization.