The Spanish government anticipates "resilience" in tourist activity in the face of the conflict in the Middle East. And it not only clings to the estimates for this Easter week, which are "fantastic" in the words of the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, but also to an "ability to adapt and resist" of a sector that in recent years has overcome crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. "The situation is completely different [to that of the coronavirus]. It cannot be compared," Hereu said at a press conference this Tuesday, after the cabinet meeting. The minister, who appeared precisely to explain the current pulse of tourism and the forecasts for this Easter week, acknowledged that there is concern about the impact of the conflict, but linked it to "secondary effects" that will depend on how long the war drags on. "We are analyzing with the sector [the current situation] and what might happen if the conflict lasts not weeks, but months," he said. For example, if this scenario leads to an even more severe price crisis.

We arrive at Easter, at the school holidays, the departure operations and the monas, stating that the return will be tough. Everything is rising due to the war in Iran, and since the end of the war is not in sight, the damage to our pockets from this inflation will last for a few weeks, at least. Yesterday evening, Trump pulled ten more days of ultimatum deadline out of the hat for the ayatollahs, while he systematically lies every day (and a lot, because he doesn't stop talking) just to prevent oil from continuing to rise in price and the stock markets from continuing to sink. He just keeps saying the war is won, but the Strait of Hormuz continues to be dominated by Iran, and the regime has not fallen. Meanwhile, in Spanish politics, there has been the announced change that could influence the future of the common financing system that applies to us. Yesterday, Vice President Montero resigned to go to Andalusia and his replacement will be Carlos Cuerpo, until now Minister of Finance. A doctor in economics, polyglot, technician, he does not have a PSOE membership card, a man who does not shout, an economist prepared to sit in Brussels or Washington or wherever; nothing to do with the mercurial Montero. And his place at the Ministry of Finance is taken by Arcadi España, a Valencian from President Ximo Puig's circle, who considers himself a federalist, who has often denounced how poorly funded the Valencian Community is, and who will have to move forward, seemingly with conviction, with the new system agreed with Esquerra. They say that in the PSC they are happy with España's appointment. But however federalist and aware he may be of the poor funding of the Valencian Community, can a socialist minister change anything about the distribution of money? This is the big question and the precedents are not precisely reassuring.

We arrive at Holy Week, school holidays, departure operations and the "monas" affirming that the return will be tough. Everything is rising due to the war in Iran, and since the end of the war is not in sight, the damage to our pockets from this inflation will last for a few weeks, at least. Last night, Trump pulled ten more days out of his hat for the ultimatum to the ayatollahs, while he systematically lies every day (and a lot, because he doesn't stop talking) just to prevent oil from continuing to rise in price and stock markets from continuing to fall. He just keeps saying that the war is won, but the Strait of Hormuz continues to be dominated by Iran, and the regime has not fallen. Meanwhile, in Spanish politics, there has been the announced change that could influence the future of the common financing system that applies to us. Yesterday, Vice President Montero resigned to go to Andalusia and his replacement will be Carlos Cuerpo, until now Minister of Finance. A doctor in economics, multilingual, technical, he does not have a PSOE party card, a man who does not shout, an economist prepared to sit in Brussels or Washington or wherever; nothing to do with the mercurial Montero. And his place at the Ministry of Finance is taken by Arcadi España, a Valencian from President Ximo Puig's circle, who considers himself a federalist, who has often denounced how poorly financed the Valencian Community is, and who will have to move forward, seemingly with conviction, with the new system agreed with Esquerra. They say that in the PSC they are happy with España's appointment. But however federalist and aware he may be of the poor financing of the Valencian Community, can a socialist minister change anything about the distribution of money? This is the big question and the precedents are not precisely reassuring.

More than a new world order, what we have before our eyes is a new law: that of the strongest, which interrupts that universal principle approved by the United Nations more than eighty years ago by which every State is equally sovereign of its own land and people. I am interested in the fundamental question that, in the name of the human condition, we must ask ourselves today: what kind of mind orders this new policy of cruelty, which is activated without dialogue or responsibility, and which spreads across the map like an avoidable epidemic, from Latin America to Northern Europe, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East?

On the war: the United States and Israel have neither overthrown the ayatollahs' regime, nor do they control the Strait of Hormuz, nor is Trump advancing peace talks as he wants us to believe with this daily obsession of talking, talking, and talking.Trump wants to claim victory and cannot, he wants to announce peace and bombs and missiles continue to be heard, and Tehran says they are not negotiating anything, the war is harming the lives of people and businesses all over the world, and it is sending us into an energy crisis that could strangle us all. The dictatorship of the Iranian clergy has understood that Trump is in a hurry to finish, and logically they are not; the regime is already very damaged, and now they want the whole world to blame Trump for the general impoverishment.In this regard, I recommend again theanalysis by our Head of International, Francesc Millán, on what might happen now. Because Trump said the war would last 4 weeks. It will be 4 weeks the day after tomorrow, Saturday. What should we do: insist on the diplomatic path or escalate the war, with nuclear weapons if necessary?In this scenario, today the anti-crisis decree is being voted on in Congress. It will be approved because Junts has already said they will support it because the PSOE will support what we explained yesterday about the zero VAT reduction for self-employed workers earning less than 85,000 euros per year. The vote and debate will be today, but yesterday Esquerra and Junts already debated another issue that will be voted on in a month, which is the decree extending rental contracts. And Rufián went all out against Junts: "Who do they work for? For whom? If they overthrow this decree, I wish them years of political ostracism. And I promise you that while I am here, I will strive very hard for that to be the case. Very. Because they do terrible harm to people, to this country, and to my country. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes..."

The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was a spark in a context already saturated with tensions, rigid alliances (with me or against me), and powers willing, or perhaps even resigned, to enter into total conflict. Today, however, although the world remains dangerous and unstable, the logic of military escalation is not the same. Therefore, even in the face of aggressions as serious as the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the US attack on Iran, nothing resembling the start of World War III has occurred. Like it or not, a key element remains nuclear deterrence. Since 1945, the major powers have known that a direct conflict could lead to a nuclear brawl with apocalyptic consequences. This awareness has created a system of mutual restraint that, paradoxically, makes it unlikely that certain wars will escalate. In the case of Ukraine, both NATO and Russia have carefully calibrated their actions to avoid a direct confrontation. They have also measured the language used to refer to the possible use of these terrible weapons, even in the case of a verbally incontinent person like Trump.

This morning something very interesting happened, a new strategic move by Pedro Sánchez in his long and well-known struggle to resist, to resist everything: his collaborators in prison, the indictment of his wife and brother, his party defeated in every election in Extremadura, Aragon, and Castile and León. This morning Sánchez went to Congress to explain the social measures to alleviate the cost of the war in Iran. And he went on the attack. Seeing that Europe is no longer leaving him alone with the "No to war" movement, he said that the 2026 war in Iran is like the 2003 Iraq War, which had disastrous consequences in Iraq, in the world, and on our streets with Islamist terrorism. That if that war was illegal, this one is too. And that the People's Party (PP) was complicit. But to say that Iran is like Iraq, to ​​once again use the trump card of the "No to war" movement of 2003, is déjà vu. And then, Sánchez personalized it with a tremendous attack against José María Aznar. He said that Aznar, in 2003, wanted to feel important, that he supported a war in exchange for ego, for the power to influence George Bush. He recalled that the Madrid bombings were the fault of that war. And he recalled that Aznar shows no remorse. He even went so far as to question his morality.

There was an initial oil crisis. We teach it in all economic history courses. The crisis began in October 1973 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, when Saudi Arabia, leading the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), refused to sell oil to countries that had sided with Israel. OPEC quickly transformed the boycott into price increases. Given the rigidity of global oil demand, OPEC was able to repeat the price increases several times, quadrupling them in just a few months—an impact that spread worldwide and fueled the obscene enrichment of the major exporters.

The week begins in a very dangerous way. As you know, Trump has announced attacks on Iranian power plants if Iran does not unblock the Strait of Hormuz Iran has warned that its response will be to attack the desalination plants of the Persian Gulf countries. You attack my electricity, and I'll attack your water.

The resignation of the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center is significant. He is not leaving his post due to a technical dispute or institutional burnout, but rather after stating that Iran did not pose an imminent threat. This statement not only contradicts the dominant narrative but also destabilizes the very foundation upon which the legitimacy of the military escalation has been built. And yet, it has barely altered the public debate.

The Spanish government will hold an extraordinary cabinet meeting on Friday to address the economic effects of the war in Iran and approve a package of measures. Sources at La Moncloa (the Prime Minister's official residence) explain that the response plan for the war in the Middle East will include both short-term and long-term solutions, as confirmed by the Third Vice President and Minister for Ecological Transition, Sara Aagesen. However, these will not initially be generalized measures like those implemented for fuel during the war in Ukraine, but rather will prioritize the most affected and also the "most vulnerable" economic sectors. On Monday, the Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, and the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, met with representatives from the food industry, the fertilizer sector—key to the primary sector—and animal feed to discuss the necessary measures for this economic sector, one of the hardest hit by the US-Israeli war against Iran. which blocks the Strait of Hormuz in response. The measures will not only address the increase in fuel prices but also the disruption of fertilizer trade, which has a significant impact due to the conflict.

On Sunday, rescue teams continued clearing debris from the primary care center bombed early Saturday morning in Burj Qalawiya, southern Lebanon. Among the building's wreckage, emergency services recovered the bodies of more paramedics who were on duty at the time of the attack. With this update, the Lebanese Ministry of Health raised the number of healthcare workers killed since the bombing to 32. the start of the Israeli offensive on March 2A figure that reflects the extent to which the war is beginning to affect those trying to save lives.

Two weeks have passed since the start of the war against Iran. A conflict that has upended international flight patterns, global diplomacy, and the global oil supply. The disconcerting thing is that neither the United States nor Israel has communicated what would need to happen for the war to be considered won. This uncertainty is centered on the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil passes. Images of burning oil tankers summarize Iran's pressure strategy. If this passage is closed, the impact on the global economy is guaranteed, and Trump's promise to escort the ships—with a system that won't be ready until the end of March—only seems to confirm that the end is not as near as we would like. But it's not just oil: we must also consider its derivatives and other raw materials that pass through the strait. One of these is sulfur, essential for producing sulfuric acid, the most manufactured chemical in the world and indispensable for extracting copper and cobalt, which in turn are fundamental for electrical transformers, batteries, and data center infrastructure. Or nitrogen fertilizers, basic for global food production.

We're ending the week with gasoline prices climbing and the war escalating. To give you an idea, the US Treasury Department has announced it will temporarily authorize countries to buy Russian oil from tankers in transit.Iran's new supreme leader, son of the previous one, says the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed While Netanyahu remains silent and bombs, Trump speaks to continue occupying the center of the stage alone and says things like the increase in fuel prices is bringing many benefits to American companies.

I suppose it's clear by now that when we talk about the Iran war, we're talking about a conflict that, apart from the deaths and displacements that, for the moment, don't affect us, has economic consequences that do affect us, especially because the price of oil has skyrocketed and threatens to rise even further.

Adopting a view shared by most of his voters, Donald Trump has made the fight against gender ideology a central tenet of his political project. In fact, this issue was one of the first areas of convergence with Elon Musk before their notable political split. The attack on Iran, in this sense, brings about a perplexing turn of events; this is what we will attempt to explain in this article.

“Not a single tear should be shed for the Iranian regime,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She continued: “[The Iranian regime] has inflicted death and imposed repression on its own people, causing devastation throughout the region.” Listening to her, it was hard not to think of the furious harangue a few days earlier by the Trump administration’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who, with a grimace and wild eyes, promised that “death and destruction will rain down from the sky” on Iran until the US and Israel consider it necessary. Perhaps President von der Leyen considers the destruction and death raining down from the sky by American and Israeli attacks preferable to the death, repression, and devastation imposed by the ayatollahs. For the Iranian people, whom she invokes, it seems they must be equally undesirable.

Trump's word is worthlessBut it does come at a price, the price we all must pay for his decisions. Aware that The war with Iran has driven up oil prices and lowered stock markets.That is, that his voters have to pay more for gasoline and that his friends are losing billions in the stock market, Trump took the floor last night to say that The war is "virtually over" And that they are far ahead of the agenda they had set, that Iran "has already fired all it was supposed to fire." And Trump's words had the desired effect: the stock markets rose this morning and the price of oil fell. If this is a fluke that won't make a summer, Trump doesn't care. Yesterday he went for the coup, but he knows there are two things ordinary Americans hate: paying higher gas prices and having inflation erode their purchasing power, all because of a war that lacks the support of the vast majority. Consider that these days oil has reached its highest price in the last three and a half years, specifically in the summer of 2022, months after the war in Ukraine began, and that the cost of living is shaping up to be the major issue in the November elections. And we all know that when oil goes up, everything goes up.

European strategic disorientation has cloaked itself in the language of force as it flirts with the risk of its own disintegration. "We need to be prepared to project our power," said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the EU ambassadors' conference held this Monday in Brussels. Faced with a precarious world, an increasingly vulnerable Union is struggling to adapt to the speed of the deconstruction of the international order. The EU has long felt overwhelmed by its irrelevance and the contempt of its traditional ally, but the Iran war has amplified the erratic "every man for himself" mentality of European leaders, each serving their own interests. Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron have rolled up their sleeves in a bilateral power struggle to lead European defense. Paris has opened discussions with some EU capitals on how to extend the French nuclear umbrella to a large part of the continent. And Cyprus has received troop and weaponry support from some EU partners following the attack it suffered in the early days of the war.

When Trump says that "Spain is a loser," also translatable as a "failed" country, he's not displaying any knowledge of history, of the loss of Cuba, from whose national depression the Generation of '98 emerged, of the Civil War, of having a Spanish army that has fired more at Spaniards than at foreigners, of Spain's history of cultural repression. Far from it, Trump says that Spain is a loser because Sánchez opposes the war, because he doesn't want to spend 5% of GDP on defense, and because now he won't let him have the American bases in Andalusia without an international mandate. This is the language of bullies: if you don't do what they want, they insult you in a humiliating way. Nor is ally Giorgia Meloni letting Trump have the Italian bases.