Hours before a terrorist commando murdered 133 people in cold blood in a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, the hit of the week was the Russian bombing of Ukraine's electrical infrastructure, which highlighted the growing vulnerability of the anti-aircraft defenses as a consequence of the partial blockade of North American military aid. 2024 is being written blow by blow.
The terrorist attack in Moscow, quickly claimed by the Islamic State, has also made it clear that Vladimir Putin's regime cannot guarantee complete security to its citizens in times of war. The film Ivan the Terrible, by the great Sergei Eisenstein, comes to mind again: while the Tsar of All Russia beats the Livonians (Latvians), the Tatars attack from behind. Enraged, Tsar Putin is now trying to link the attack to Ukraine, and that sounds familiar in Spain.
Black storms are approaching and the advisors of the President of the French Republic have not thought of anything other than to broadcast some images of Emmanuel Macron furiously hitting a punching bag. Fury is the music of this time. Macron is in good physical shape and clearly transmits a message: France, the only nuclear power in the European Union, is willing to fight beyond diplomacy to avoid a collapse of the Ukrainian front before the summer. Macron's poster also has an internal reading: he warns Marine Le Pen's National Rally that his former ties to Moscow will be constantly reminded.
Faced with the photos of the French welterweight boxer, Russia massively bombs Ukrainian power plants coinciding with the European Council meeting in Brussels; An Islamic commando spreads terror in Moscow, and the tsar promises terrible revenge, trying to blame Ukraine. In Spain, as he told them, this sounds familiar to us.
That's the tragic sequence of the week. It should be added that this is not the first time that the current tenant of the Elysée has shown his love for boxing. In the 2022 presidential campaign, candidate Macron already exchanged some blows with a professional boxer in the Parisian park of Saint-Denis. It seems that boxing is fashionable in the French political environment. It is a sign of the times. To win you have to hit hard, very hard.
And that is precisely what is happening in Spain, where the exchange of blows is increasingly frenetic, with everyone rushing to get into the ring. Everyone wants to measure themselves. Three consecutive elections in two months: Basque Country (April 21), Catalonia (May 12), European Parliament (June 9). And Madrid DF turned into a quagmire, with many people literally hysterical in the towers of the digital press.
Spanish politics does not want to box with Russia. In Madrid they have not gone crazy. They want to box exclusively among themselves. Not even jokingly would Pedro Sánchez allow himself to be photographed wearing gloves to send a warning message to Putin. Alberto Núñez Feijóo does not even mention the war in Ukraine in his speeches. Popular Party and PSOE really want to fight each other, to maintain a common point, a cardinal point in common: they are putting the brakes on in the face of European rearmament requirements.
Sánchez has delegated the alarmist discourse to Margarita Robles (see La Vanguardia last Sunday), while trying to direct the rearmament discourse towards the field of technological investment to present the reinforcement of military budgets as a contribution to economic progress. Since it does not have a parliamentary majority for an explicit rearmament program, the extension of the 2023 budget saves it a discussion that would have been hellish two months before the European elections. And this helps us understand that the President of the Government did nothing to prevent the calling of early elections in Catalonia. The discussion on military spending will take place in the fall when the 2025 budgets have to be debated and we will see what the international situation is then. The Popular Party, let's look closely, is not demanding that the PSOE talk about war. Since 2004, the PP has fled from the word war like a scalded cat.
More things have happened in the ring this week. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in low times, turned into a puppet of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, has definitively distanced herself from a hypothetical candidacy for the presidency of the government of Spain. The train moves away from Puerta del Sol. If he makes no mistake in the Europeans, Núñez Feijóo will consolidate himself as the leader of the right, while Santiago Abascal seems half hidden, as if he feared something. That was not the photograph of July 24.
In Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, the Forgiven, will try to rebuild Democratic Convergence in the May elections, combining pragmatism, verbal radicalism and antisocialism, the vital substance of the imperishable convergent gene. This week, while Díaz Ayuso's team sank into the mud, Feijóo publicly acknowledged that Esteban González Pons met with Junts leaders in August. While bombing the amnesty, the Spanish right is building a tunnel to be able to agree with Junts to interrupt the legislature if Sánchez remains in the minority when he has to approve the rearmament budget.
It is not easy to summarize the current moment, while Truffaut's four hundred blows fall and the world seems to have gone mad.
