After a summer of stifling heat, fires and torrential rains, it seems that autumn has finally arrived in Catalonia. We are entering fully into an electoral pre-campaign, now without torrid nights that do not let us sleep, mobile alerts or heat waves. But everything points to the fact that climate change will be one of the great absentees of the debate.

Whenever there is talk of the far-right as a "new" phenomenon or it is presented to us as a radical, sudden novelty, we should be deeply skeptical. One only needs to consider that the first breakthrough of the first Le Pen of the early French FN dates back to the distant year of 1984 in the European Parliament. It obtained 11% of the votes, more than two million votes and ten parliamentary seats –today the far-right parties already occupy 25% of the Eurochamber and Marine Le Pen is ready to contest her fourth presidential election–. In 1992, when memory burns, shelters for refugees were already being set on fire in Rostock –and today the AfD is the leading force in Saxony-Anhalt, with 44% of the vote–. In the early nineties –1991, 1992, 1993– the fascism that did not wear a tie was still murdering Lucrecia Pérez in Madrid, Sonia Rescalvo in Barcelona and Guillem Agulló in Montanejos –and now the beatings of migrants wear a military uniform in Ceuta–. At the end of the 90s, the Italian MSI of Gianfranco Fini, already converted into the National Alliance, was entering the incipient governments of Berlusconi, and Fini himself, il fascista del Duemila, would end up being vice president and minister of Foreign Affairs. Today Meloni governs the Italian state with a plenipotentiary vocation and announces an authoritarian electoral reform in the name of governability.

One of the risks of politics is the extreme oscillation between tactics and the empty promise of maximums, leaving the essential space, the decisive space of strategy, neglected. This neglected space is the most necessary one for being able to propose solid, viable, and sustained proposals over time. We live, however, and we are all aware of it, caught on a pendulum that is pushed not by the tangential force of gravity but by the decibels of shouts and insults.

Housing –the reason why the general elections in the State have been brought forward– is entering fully into the electoral pre-campaign of November 29th. This Monday it did so when the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a sum of 45 million euros to expand the supply of university residence places throughout the State and promote affordable accommodation aimed at them. The goal is to try to give a breather to university students who have to do everything possible to, often unsuccessfully, find an apartment. Of this sum, 2.9 million euros will go to Catalonia, specifically for a project that the Lleida City Council is promoting, as detailed by the Ministry of Housing. In a first phase, still without a calendar, it is expected to mobilize 2,000 places.

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.

One of the pearls of wisdom from Baruch Spinoza's Ethics is the idea that "An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed unless by a contrary and stronger emotion than the emotion to be hindered". I believe this is the phrase I will repeat most to orient myself in this confusing electoral campaign that awaits us. Because it will soon be a couple of decades that the system's only response to the breakdown of the social contract is to frame the political debate as a struggle between the rationality of experts and centrist parties and the madness of extremists. And, naturally, the extremes have not stopped rising. Following Spinoza, the only way to save democracy (or, rather, to restore it) is to stop identifying it with dismissive rationality and to recover its scandalous and radical core.

Duralex endures. Just like its products. The brand does not break. Even though in the last two decades it has been in insolvency proceedings five times and now, that it was in danger again, it has been saved once more from closure to begin a new stage. Duralex advertised itself as tableware “practically unbreakable” and it was. It did not deceive. They devised an innovative technique that consisted of heating the glass a lot and then cooling it down rapidly. Thus, they made it much more resistant. And if many homes still have vestiges of Duralex, it is because, effectively, it has withstood many onslaughts and endured them. But does it make sense to cling to a brand that was very useful in the 60s and 70s, when it was alone in its field? Objectively, nowadays there is a wide and better offer than the traditional Duralex. What do we want, then, from nostalgia? And what nostalgia is salvageable?

For days now, pensions and the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) have come into play in the run-up to the November 29th election campaign. First, Vox questioned the sustainability of the pension system, and this week the PP got itself into a muddle with the future increase in benefits, even though its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wanted to make his position clear: "Pensions are non-negotiable and that's that. They will be updated in line with the CPI, without a doubt. We will guarantee their viability, without a doubt," the popular leader stated this Thursday.

1. There are no nuances left now. One after another, the European right-wing parties are capitulating, surrendering themselves to the far-right. In Italy, the latest whim of President Giorgia Meloni, who has already been in power for four years, has been an electoral law that gifts seventy seats to whoever obtains 42% of the votes, that is to say, a bonus that minimizes pluralism. And everyone has taken it in their stride. We are in the dynamic of "anything goes".

1. The elections scheduled for next November 29th are not the consequence of a specific event (the express housing decrees) but rather of an unviable government at least since the events in Ceuta at the end of July, which to this day have still not been resolved. If Junts and the PNV had supported laws that, on the other hand, can be applied provisionally, the parliamentary precariousness would be the same. In this sense, whether the elections were on November 29th or in a few months, in the year 2027, when they were due, is irrelevant. The dramatization of the early call, as well as its overacted political interpretation, is part of a legitimate electoral strategy. In any case, it is just that: an electoral strategy that theoretically favors the PSOE and the parties that provide it with parliamentary support. For the moment, no poll suggests that this expectation equates to a victory.

Rufián has ended up becoming a kind of half-candidate between ERC and Podemos, an idea that until not long ago might have seemed outlandish and that now passes as a kind of compromise solution. Between now and Friday, it remains to be seen whether his maneuver succeeds in leading the rest of the parties "to the left of the PSOE" that are looking to constitute the so-called Broad Front –Moviment Sumar, Comuns, Més Madrid, and Esquerra Unida– to present a single ballot in the elections, as many of their voters and some of the parties that want to join but without diluting their acronyms (as happened in 2023 with the creation of Sumar) are asking for. This is the case of Compromís, in the Valencian Country, and of Més per Mallorca and Més per Menorca, in the Balearic Islands. A single ballot would be the clearest electoral message that the left could send to its voters, and for Gabriel Rufián it would mean the validation of his thesis on the need to unite everyone who has the concern of stopping the extreme right in Spain. A frontist message and thesis, unprecedented in a candidacy for the general elections of a Catalan pro-independence party. The other thing that obviously remains to be seen is how this new configuration affects the electoral results that ERC may obtain in Catalonia. As a counterpart in the negotiations between the two parties, Podemos has renounced running in Catalonia for the benefit of ERC, but it is unlikely that the rest of the Broad Front parties with electoral aspirations in Catalonia will want to do the same.

Whenever elections arrive, a small miracle of nature occurs. Politicians whom we had only seen for months in congresses, television sets, or party events suddenly appear on the street. They shake hands with retirees, enter shops, walk through markets, and even hold babies in their arms. It is like discovering the first butterfly of spring. One thought they had gone extinct, like diplodocuses, and it turns out they were just hibernating.

Darwin's theory has often been misunderstood: according to the English naturalist, the law of the jungle is not that of the strongest, but that of the most adaptable. The species that triumph are those that best adapt to environmental conditions. This has precisely been the essence of Pedro Sánchez's political survival, based on an extraordinary pragmatic capacity to take advantage of parliamentary arithmetic and the social and economic conditions of each moment, without falling into orthodox rigidities.

Spanish politics has stages of incomparable turmoil. These days the acceleration has reached a degree of excitement that makes one fear for the coronary health of governments, politicians, propagandists, and believing citizens in general. Trying to understand the world that surrounds us in full acceleration and once we have exhausted the quotes from the cynic Machiavelli, the blessed Rousseau, the provocateur Nietzsche, and the brave Arendt, we are only left to surrender ourselves to the wisdom of James Bond. Politics today responds to the “shaken, not stirred” (shaken, not stirred) of yet another Martini that we know cannot end well.

“We will not allow the attempt at emotional manipulation of the Spanish people.” These words are Feijóo’s, to justify the PP’s refusal to attend the minutes of silence for the death of Maricarmen Abascal. An exercise in insensitivity that portrays the character and manifests his inability to grasp the moods of the citizenry.

During a very long and bitter night, that of April 9, 1992, I learned to distrust electoral polls. Which usually get it right, except when a society shows symptoms of deep boiling. That is to say, when the famous "liquid society" and in continuous mutation defined by Zygmunt Bauman passes into a completely unpredictable gaseous state. In the elections of November 29, one of these gas explosions could occur.

October. Elections are called in Spain, and in Catalonia, it rains buckets with lightning and thunder and a lot of water and a lot of lightning and thunder. October. Elections are called in Spain, and in Catalonia, it rains buckets with thunder and lightning and a lot of lightning and a lot of thunder and a lot of water and Llarena lifts the arrest warrant for Puigdemont. Not because of the Llarena of the Supreme Court but because of the Constitutional Court and not because of the Constitutional Court but because of the CJEU. The rain continues and the campaign begins before the elections have even been called because the campaign is always underway. The rain has the advantage that, at some point, it stops raining. The campaign, on the other hand, always overwhelms us. Nothing is so much for the country as it is for the survival of the parties. Oh, the parties. For personal survival itself. Oh, the egos. There are those who, without us knowing how, always manage to stay on the surface and not drown. Mazón. There is, above all, a déjà-vu, a kind of stalled commuter train, or a commuter train, it doesn't need the adjective, carrying the same passengers from one election to the next. The motivation has to do with the fear of those who might come and the lack of motivation with the fact that there is no one to excite us. No one told us that voting was easy. They only told us to vote. And they will put up posters and banners as if we were walking down the street today looking up and not looking at our mobile phones, which is what we do with our necks bent. We don't see the clouds. We only turn off the ES-Alert. October. Elections are called in Spain, and in Catalonia, it rains buckets with lightning and thunder. October. It stops raining and a longed-for coolness arrives. So that we don't get too excited, since we are Catalans, they already warn that the coolness is temporary. A taste of autumn. Honey on the lips. I sweat just thinking that the heat of the summer that made us sweat through everything might return.

Pensions are entering the campaign for the November 29 elections. In fact, it is usually like this every time there is an electoral call, due to the sensitivity of the debate for a good part of the population – if not all of it – of voting age: there are currently 9.54 million pensioners across the country who receive a contributory pension (the majority for retirement). But the calculation of this benefit depends above all on those who do not yet receive it and hope to receive it in the future: workers who contribute to Social Security and, in particular, those who still have years of their working career ahead of them.

The People's Party is already muddying the electoral pre-campaign. And the chosen strategy, common among the right-wing, is to opt for social media. This Monday, the same day that Pedro Sánchez called early general elections for November 29th, the PP published a video on X against the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente. The tweet was a response to a post by the socialist in which he claimed that Feijóo "was already feeling the fear." The reaction of the populars was to publish a video from when the minister tore his quadriceps in 2023: "You were the one who was afraid of a sprain," they wrote.