In a month Spain will go to the polls again but a review of its numbers, in the cold, makes it clear that there are one or the other, the challenges continue to be huge and that is why the solutions concern everyone. Problem: here, the management, matters just when voting. Meanwhile, a new world accelerates.
The map that opens this newsletter summarizes the conservative tsunami that swept street after street in the municipal and regional elections on May 28. In a month, moreover, the generals arrive... Can the winds blow in the same direction?
It's all to see. Because Spain is unique. Or at least that's what their numbers suggest.
For example: does management matter here when it comes to voting? The question is not trivial. At first it seems almost meaningless because why vote if not to censor or support a specific management? Well then: 28-M punished well-valued governments and rewarded others poorly valued.
Surprise. And more when challenges abound. The comparison with Europe makes it clear: the distance in GDP per inhabitant between Spain and the Old Continent has gone from 6% in 2009 to 17% in 2022.
There is nothing.
Unemployment, precariousness and low productivity keep us apart. "The problem is that the structural reforms necessary to raise productivity have not been carried out," recites Xavier Vives of IESE.
Translation: it is necessary to create jobs with greater added value, which usually moves away from the service sector and closer to the industry, something pursued by all but in which (again) if the long term is taken after the passage of one and the other by Moncloa, it does not happen. Since 1980, only the automotive sector has improved its weight compared to services.
The industrial sector represents about 15% of the country's wealth, far from the 20% expected by the EU. Moving forward here seems, for this very reason, a rather shared goal a priori. And nothing, although its effect is noticeable in everyone's pocket.
The electoral campaign for July 23 is focused, the other way around, and for now, in other areas, especially in that of sexist violence, being as it is, by some, but not a few, in question. Although the numbers do not deceive: the more than a thousand women killed since 2003 corroborate it.
A scandal.
The war in Ukraine has seen a full stop for the destruction of the Kajovka dam just weeks ago. (Here recreated in detail). The damage is, right or wrong, incalculable; people at risk, thousands; its consequences for the war, key when a good part of the southern front was flooded.
But beyond, as if it were a game of dominoes, it is, again, also a food coup: it involves the blowing up of the Ukrainian granary as kilometers and kilometers of irrigated areas are greatly affected. A granary – it is obligatory to say it – that affects everyone.
Outside of Europe, the world does not stop either and it is not just about the usual cold war between the US and China despite the visit of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing. Two countries stand out, and in the least obvious way: the Indian diaspora, because it is already the largest and most influential in history, taking the top positions in key sectors, while the numbers of India within its borders do not let up either. to grow...
… and Nigeria, which inaugurates the largest refinery in Africa. Its size, compared to Barcelona as illustrated below, says it all. It is driven, relevant, from indigenous capital. And if you think of it as in Suez, that is, because of its relevance to both the local and global economy, little else needs to be added.
The new world and its new actors accelerate.
Surprises never stop happening and what seems impossible is sometimes possible, to everyone's astonishment.
It makes it clear, for example, and for the better, how the 360º blockade of Berlin was overcome in the cold war; how it was given an alternative by air, reconstructed today in detail in this infographic story. He still leaves his mouth open after 75 years.
The same was expected to find the people on board the lost submersible alive in a vast area of the Atlantic when it was on its way to the Titanic. It could not be. The event, yes, puts adventures and technologies on the table at more than 200,000 euros per person and for eight days that are available to very, very few.
It is also another world.
