The electoral pre-campaign has been blown to pieces. Until the accident in Toledo, what we had was a comeback for the PSOE that, even if it might not have been enough to break the PP-Vox majority, was enough to put Alberto Núñez Feijóo in a bad spot and weaken his leadership. Now the PSOE and the left have no choice but to activate survival mode to prevent the conservative wave from running them over. And this opens up the range of other multiple battles.

The leadership of Aliança Catalana has nipped in the bud an internal revolt by militants from different regions who were demanding more internal democracy. The trigger was a letter promoted and signed by these affiliates, in which they demanded that the party's participation in the general elections be put to a vote. A debate that the president of the organization, Sílvia Orriols, stopped in its tracks by threatening to leave the party if the leadership opted to make the leap to Congress. "The day the governing committee decides otherwise, I will tear up my membership card and go back to working as an administrative assistant in the private sector," she wrote in a tweet, facing the rumblings from part of the base and even some members of the leadership who were defending it privately.

Pedro Sánchez has decided to bet firmly in this electoral pre-campaign on exploiting his most personal and human profile, a terrain where he feels comfortable and which contrasts with the difficulties of the Popular Party's Alberto Núñez Feijóo to go off-script without making mistakes. After his appearance on La revuelta, the Spanish president continues his tour of casual interviews and has landed on the podcast Keep it cutre, where he assured that he decided to call early general elections during a family lunch on Sunday, October 4th, one day before publicly announcing the call: "Both my parents and my wife told me that it was necessary to call elections. [...] That was where I made the decision," he said in the podcast episode where he is interviewed, hosted by Ángela Henche and Albanta San Román and published this morning on YouTube.

Junts would be willing to invest a socialist president after November 29th, provided that the PSOE meets the demands of Carles Puigdemont's party, and the candidate for president is not Pedro Sánchez. The Junts candidate for the Spanish elections, Miriam Nogueras, set the party's position this Tuesday for the investiture of the future president of the state government and clarified what was meant bythe party would not invest either Pedro Sánchez or Alberto Núñez Feijóo, as the top leaders had expressed in recent days. Junts will not remain on the sidelines of the State's governability; quite the contrary, as Nogueras and her running mates have championed the "useful policy" that they have developed in the Spanish Cortes this term. In fact, the members of Junts want to be decisive again after November 29th.

The disturbances of the last few days in A Coruña, Barcelona, and Bilbao have made security the main focus of the PP's discourse this week. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's strategy is to link the incidents directly to Pedro Sánchez and to position himself, in contrast to the socialist leader, as a guarantor of "order". He will do so, for example, by visiting businesses affected by the looting in Barcelona this Wednesday, just as his number 2, Miguel Tellado, visited Bilbao this Tuesday. "From the 30th onwards, there will be order. We will be implacable with the violent ones and the law will always be upheld," Feijóo stated at an event presenting the electoral list for Madrid for the November 29 elections.

No event without a headline. Gabriel Rufián criticized the Broad Front and Junts at his book presentation, and has once again advocated for the unity of the forces to the left of the PSOE. He also reclaimed his origins —"I come from the shit", he insisted— and remarked on the need to take measures to put an end to the housing crisis. All of this was to be expected and, in fact, he already pointed it out at this Saturday's launch of the joint candidacy of ERC and Podemos for November 29th. At the last moment, however, journalist Àngels Barceló asked him what professional "ambition" he has, and Rufián, after months of showing himself willing to lead the leftists in the State, answered with a plot twist. "I would like to be president of the Generalitat after Junqueras", replied Rufián in the middle of the pre-campaign for the Spanish elections.

The Supreme Court raises the tone in the conflict with the Spanish government over the vote of those naturalized under the Democratic Memory Law. The high court has given a five-day deadline to ministers José Manuel Albares and Félix Bolaños to submit the list of the 163,020 people affected by the suspension of the vote for the Spanish elections on November 29th. They must send it to the Supreme Court, the Central Electoral Board, and the Electoral Census Office, and they have until Wednesday, October 28th, at 3:00 PM to do so. The contentious-administrative chamber of the high court does not stop there, but threatens the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes with a possible fine or, even, with criminal liability –which would have to be investigated by the criminal chamber– if they fail to comply with the requirement. The fine would be 1,000 euros and could be “reiterated” until the request is met.

Ada Colau already has someone to accompany her on her adventure in Madrid. The Comuns have validated the lists for the general elections, which hid a last-minute surprise: Aina Vidal, the current deputy spokesperson for Sumar in Congress, has been excluded. This Wednesday's national council was not exactly smooth sailing, with several voices dissenting from this decision, which also provoked a significant protest vote. The lists for the four Catalan constituencies were approved with 66% of votes in favor, but with 34% against and 20 blank votes. Vidal was the head of the Comuns list in the 2023 elections.

Vox announced on Wednesday the names heading their lists for the Spanish elections on November 29. Most of the current members of Congress are in the top spots, but there are also nearly twenty new faces. And among them stands out the head of the list for Tarragona, where the far-right has decided to place a candidate with a neo-Nazi past. This is Jordi de la Fuente, a councilor in Sant Adrià de Besòs and current leader of Solidaridad, the Vox union.

Donald Trump's government prevents Ada Colau's entry into Puerto Rico. As reported by Eldiario.es and confirmed by Comuns sources consulted by ARA, the US administration has denied the permit for the Front Ampli candidate for the 29-N elections to enter the US-associated state, where she was invited to participate on November 3rd and 4th in an event alongside the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. The official reason, according to the same sources, is the "suspicion" that the former mayor of Barcelona "intends to migrate illegally to the country," but the party denounces that "she has been blacklisted due to her activism and for ideological reasons."

Business-oriented move by Vox. In the lists for the Congress of Deputies for the constituency of Barcelona, to which ARA has had access, the economic guru of the radical right-wing party, Ignacio Fontcuberta, is incorporated as number 3. Santiago Abascal has decided to place his finance man to build a bridge "with the business fabric" in Catalonia, according to sources familiar with the operation. Even more so considering his background as an executive, which has allowed him to hold a prominent position in the party.

Although officially there is less than a month left before the electoral campaign begins—on November 13th—the feeling since Pedro Sánchez called the general elections for November 29th is that the race to remain, in the case of the socialists, and to achieve, in the case of the opposition, the Moncloa has begun. And Sánchez has drawn it with the banner of social measures as his insignia. Beyond the promise to raise the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI) or to revalue pensions with inflation, Sánchez has already put improvements for university students on the table. This Monday, he announced 45 million euros to expand the supply of university residence places, as well as the approval of a new University Student Statute that will update the 2010 Statute, the first one that was drafted in democracy. Both measures will be approved this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers and do not have to go through Congress, so the Permanent Deputation will not come into play.

At the gates of the elections, the ERC candidate, Gabriel Rufián, publishes How to beat the fascists (Ara Llibres), in which he breaks down the keys to combat the far right and, in this way, avoid a victory for the PP with the support of Vox on 29-N. Below, we offer you a decalogue with the most important ideas of this work that distills the sharp style of the republican leader:

The most common question these days among the journalists in Congress themselves is: "And you, what do you think will happen on November 29th? Who will win? It is curious to verify that, at first, practically everyone takes it for granted that the PP will prevail and that it will govern with the support of a few dozen Vox deputies, between 50 and 70. However, if the person being asked looks unsure, their interlocutor also begins to search for arguments to give consistency to their prediction, as if they needed to convince themselves that their forecast is well-founded and a foregone conclusion.

The song Los niños del barrio was playing when the leaders of the Broad Front appeared this Saturday in Madrid before more than a thousand militants who were waiting to learn about the project that brings together the left in the State for the November 29 elections. But not everyone was there. Los niños from Podem were missing, with whom the possibility of running together in Madrid, Barcelona, and other territories vanished this Friday night after an "agonizing" negotiation, acknowledge some voices from this space, who arrived at the event having barely slept. Gabriel Rufián was also not there, who had risen as the unifying face of all the forces to the left of the PSOE to curb the threat of a PP-Vox government. Nor was Yolanda Díaz, who three years ago was the candidate for this space – then under the name Sumar – for the presidency of the Spanish government. This Saturday she had a parallel event at a university. Today, Ada Colau returns to the political front line, candidate of the Broad Front for the presidency of the Spanish government and number one for Barcelona – Ernest Urtasun will run as number two on the ticket in the Catalan capital –, and Emilio Delgado will be the number one for Madrid.

"Let them hear it loud and clear: I love you". This is how the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, addressed his wife during a rally in Fuenlabrada following the federal committee meeting that approved the PSOE's candidate lists for November 29th. In an event charged with high emotion, Sánchez began his speech by referring to Begoña Gómez, his wife, who is facing trial and was seated in the front row. "They have tried to break us in every way and have achieved just the opposite. Today we are more united and stronger than ever. Let them hear it loud and clear: I love you," he declared, while also thanking her for being his wife and the mother of his daughters. Then Gómez went up to the stage, and they hugged and kissed before the audience's ovation. Later, he made a post saying that he loves her with the video of the scene.

The unity of the left-wing parties to the left of the PSOE will not happen. 

With time already exhausted, the divorce of the state left-wing parties has been consummated. The negotiations between Broad Front and Podemos to run together in the November 29th elections have failed—there will only be unitary lists in the Canary Islands and the Valencian Community. "The Broad Front has done everything possible to build the broadest and most diverse political alliance possible," they noted past midnight from the party that, among others, is led by Ada Colau. Midnight was the deadline to register coalitions for the state elections on November 29th. Now, it will still be necessary to define the lists of candidates that must be presented before October 26th.

Gabriel Rufián considers the possibility of a unitary agreement to the left of the PSOE as practically buried, both in Catalonia and in the State, and admits that he has even thought about quitting. This is how he explained it in an interview on RAC1, with only a few hours left before the deadline to present coalitions for November 29th ends at midnight. The leader of the republicans in Madrid, very critical of his party's leadership, revealed that this Thursday he was about to step aside, but ended up discarding it because they "stopped" him, and also out of responsibility. Even so, he has acknowledged that he has not succeeded with his plans in favor of a unitary candidacy: "I have failed, we have failed. There are hours left, but it is very likely that it will not happen," he said.

This Friday night marks the end of the legal deadline to register coalitions, and the left-wing parties at the state level still have not reached an agreement to run together in the upcoming Spanish elections. A critical situation that various Comuns sources believe Gabriel Rufián has brought about by reaching a pact only with Podemos, giving it more bargaining power against the parties of the Broad Front.