It was trumpeted (if you’ll forgive the pun) as the most important election in decades, and America 2020 didn’t disappoint. Although numbers are still to be confirmed, the Trump vs Biden presidential election saw a record voter turnout with two-thirds of the electorate going to the polls on election day. This represents the highest turnout […]
Black swan. These were the two words that came to my mind when the first case of coronavirus was detected in Spain less than two months ago. Of course, I’m not saying I saw it coming. Not even last week could I have anticipated that the coronavirus would force Spain’s government to declare a state […]
When Pedro Sánchez called for elections in February last year, nobody could imagine that Spain would be without government for the next 326 days. Finally, after two elections and three unsuccessful attempts, Sánchez has managed to secure a majority of votes in Congress and has been re-elected President. Sánchez’s re-election, however, came at a high […]
“Spaniards: Franco is dead”. These words, uttered on TV by prime minister Carlos Arias Navarro back in 1975, brought an end to almost four decades of dictatorship in Spain and kicked off the most prosperous period in the country’s history. In the 45 years since, a debate has raged over whether Western Europe’s last dictator should […]
The rise of populist movements has traditionally been connected to economic and political crises. Time without number, times of turmoil and social conflict have bred demagogues feeding on people’s anger and hopelessness, offering simple answers to complex problems. Spain has been no exception to this pattern over the last few years. The Great Recession of […]
The project for a single currency in Africa seems closer than ever. The fifteen countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) recently agreed to abandon their monetary sovereignty in 2020 and introduce a new common currency: the ECO. This isn’t the first shared currency in post-colonial Africa. The CFA franc is now […]
The results of the recent elections in Spain have caused a stir in the already-complicated Spanish political landscape for several reasons. First, the Socialist Party is back. After leading his party to its worst result since 1979, Pedro Sánchez managed to win back the support of two million voters that had opted for the left-wing […]
When the European Central Bank announced the end of quantitative easing in December, it was conveying a very clear message to markets and governments alike: we are approaching the end of expansionary monetary policies, so get ready for what’s coming. That much was clear from the press release the ECB put out at the time, hinting that […]
Eight months. That’s how much time has passed since Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez unseated Mariano Rajoy in a no-confidence vote in June last year. Unfortunately for Sanchez, it is also the duration of his first term in office. This morning, Sánchez had to make the difficult decision of calling a snap elections for April […]
Last month, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez reached an agreement with Podemos, the left-wing populist party over next year’s budget. Despite the government’s efforts to get other political groups to support the proposals, which have already criticised by the European Commission for being too expansive, the lack of a parliamentary majority means it will be […]
In the introduction to the book Twenty-First Century Populism, Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as “an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice”. […]
What are the limits of free speech? According John Stuart Mill, one of the intellectual fathers of classical liberalism, the answer to this question lies in the so-called Harm Principle: free speech should be limited only in those cases where exercising it harms others. This sounds reasonable. After all, it is consistent with the motto […]
In the hills outside Madrid, 37 miles away from the crowded city centre of the capital, a 500-foot cross stands over a Catholic basilica known as The Valley of the Fallen. The vast monument, built between 1940 and 1958 to honour the dead from the victorious Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War, is the […]
The bizarre case of former Barcelona footballer Eric Abidal has once more brought the issue of organ donation into the public eye. To recap, Spanish newspaper El Confidencial published reports suggesting that back in 2012 the club’s then president Sandro Rosell tried to buy the cancer-stricken player a liver on the black market and then claim the […]
Politics is the art of spending regardless of whether there is money to do so. This seems to be the motto of Pedro Sánchez, the new prime minister of Spain, who has recently revealed his intentions to boost public spending until the end of his term, presumably in 2020. The good performance of the Spanish […]
When Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had his budget passed by Congress two weeks ago, nothing indicated that he was about to be removed from office. But one of the most successful political manoeuvres in the history of modern Spain came to a climax at the end of last week, when Rajoy was replaced as […]
In response to the recent approval of a modest pension increase by the Spanish government, thousands of pensioners marched the streets of major Spanish cities last Thursday in protest. Madrid saw particularly heated demonstrations when 3,000 people broke through the police cordon and surrounded the Congress of Deputies. Since the 2013 reform of the Spanish […]
In a deliberately confusing speech during a plenary session of the regional parliament on October 11, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont unilaterally announced the independence of Catalonia and then proposed that parliament suspend that independence so as to start negotiations with Spain’s national government. Spanish President Mariano Rajoy responded with a touch of cheek, asking the […]
Since the Syrian Civil War started in 2011, over five million people have seen themselves forced to flee the country in search of a better life. Most of them have resettled in neighboring countries, mainly in Turkey, which has accommodated around 3 million refugees since the outbreak of the war. In the EU, Germany has […]
When the British Government announced last week that it was bringing forward increases to the pension age, there was outrage. Critics claimed it was austerity via the back door, that Britons were going to be working until they dropped. Entirely missing from the debate was any sense that this is a problem affecting all Western […]
