👉 PP cosplays the far right

Plus: Drama at the NATO summit and what the heck is DMOCRACIA?

Madrid | Issue #154

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Starting the engines

🥊 Spain's right prepares its election platform for 2027

Halloween came early this year, and someone is going as Vox’s Santiago Abascal.

Something is shifting in Spain’s political landscape this week. A series of proposals, statements, and deals involving the Partido Popular (PP) shows the party edging further right, both rhetorically and strategically, as it tries to both prepare for 2027 elections (a centrist affair) while at the same time holding off the far-right Vox.

Hint: It's not a pretty dance.

• The move. Led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the conservative party has tried to position itself as a moderate, center-right alternative to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE. In recent days, however, it has increasingly operated in terrain that is traditionally dominated by Vox.

Let us count the ways.

1️⃣ The child not yet born has entered the debate. The clearest example of this is Feijóo’s promise this week to take Madrid’s “Unborn Child Law” nationwide.

• Pre-birth benefits. The law, recently passed by Madrid’s regional government, led by presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP), allows an unborn child to be counted as a member of the family for administrative purposes. As in, families can access public aid for housing, education, tax benefits and the like, from around week 14 of pregnancy.

• The argument. The PP says the move will help families have children by making the economics more possible.

• The drama. It’s controversial to some because it looks like a step toward an idea promoted by anti-abortion groups — that a fetus should be treated as a person with rights.

• The criticism. While the law stops short of granting fetuses full legal personhood, which would require changing Spain’s Civil Code and clash with Constitutional Court doctrine, critics argue it normalizes an idea that could eventually justify restricting abortion.

The big deal. The PP says it will not roll back Spain’s abortion law, which was upheld in 2023. But some on the left are painting this as a slippery slope and a way to shift the cultural baseline without triggering immediate legal backlash.

• Far-right chimes in. Vox, for its part, is delighted — but not satisfied. The party supports the law while pushing for something more radical: full legal recognition of the unborn, which would directly challenge abortion rights.

2️⃣ “Cancer” comparisons = bad. Feijóo told business leaders that workers’ absenteeism is a “cancer” that costs Spain more than €30bn a year. He also questioned why workers on sick leave should earn the same as those working.

Reality check. Before you ask, yes, Spain does have a real absenteeism problem. Around 4.5% of workers are on sick leave, nearly double the EU average, and public spending on it has surged to €18.4bn annually.

• Why? The data is complex — linked to an aging workforce, long waiting lists in public healthcare, and rising mental health issues. Honestly, we don't know exactly why rates are so high.

Cue the outrage. Feijóo's suggestion of effectively reducing pay during sick leave touched a nerve. Critics (i.e., Sánchez and government-allied unions) accused him of targeting vulnerable workers and encouraging people to work while ill.

• The walkback. The PP walked back Feijóo's words a bit yesterday, with party officials saying he was referring only to fraudulent cases, not genuinely sick workers. 😒

3️⃣ A new, new deal. The PP formalized yet another agreement with Vox to form a coalition government, this time in Andalucía. The part that matters? It includes Vox's “national priority”, a concept that prioritizes access to public services for people with local ties rather than newcomers (i.e., mostly immigrants).

• Leaning further right. On migration, the agreement rejects the redistribution of unaccompanied minors and undocumented immigrants, tightens controls on immigrants, and promotes the return of some to their countries of origin — policies that closely mirror Vox’s agenda.

How do the far-righties like it? Vox’s reaction to all this is…complex, and its official stance depends on your media diet.

• Happy! The party is pleased, according to the right-leaning El Mundo. Feijóo’s apparent shift validates its stance, and relations between the two parties are now described as a “fully extended hand”.

• Sad! Other media (notably the left-leaning El País) suggest something else: Vox actually prefers a stronger, more centrist PP, so the two parties can fight divide the right-leaning electorate and maximize the right-wing vote.

And the polls? If this is a strategy, it may be working. Recent polls show the PP and Vox holding a double-digit lead over the left, with the conservative bloc ahead by more than 12 points. Some projections even suggest Sánchez’s coalition could collapse to just over 110 seats — a historic low.

• Tail wagging the dog. At the end of the day, it feels like Feijóo is following, not leading, his rivals.

More news below. 👇👇

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Episode 2 of The Bubble Podcast is out! We talk about true crime (maybe), how to enjoy this summer’s verbenas, and mistakes foreigners make when moving to Spain.

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties

1. 🧯NATO drama puts Spain in the spotlight (again!)

Family gathering. This week’s NATO summit in Ankara was supposed to focus on defense, military spending, and the alliance’s response to instability in the Middle East. Instead, it turned into a political spectacle both in Turkey and here in Spain.

Make Spain pay again. Ahead of the summit, Donald Trump (aka the 🍊 Menace) escalated his feud with Spain, calling it a “terrible partner” and even suggesting the U.S. would cut off trade entirely.

• Frustrated! The orange fella's frustration stems from PM Sánchez's refusal to sign up to NATO’s long-term military spending targets or allow the U.S. to use joint bases in Spain in its campaign against Iran.

• Sorry, Don! In reality, Trump’s trade threat means squat has little chance of succeeding. Spain cannot negotiate trade independently as EU policy is set in Brussels. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also stepped in to defend Spain, highlighting that it has now reached the basic 2% defense spending benchmark (which is true, although he credited Trump for it).

• Did you watch the game? PM Sánchez, meanwhile, opted for de-escalation, describing his interactions with Trump during the summit as “cordial” (“we talked about football and golf”) and insisting that relations remain strong. 💝

Hell froze over. Back in Spain, Vox leader Santiago Abascal made the (very) unusual move of publicly criticizing his supreme leader pal Trump — not over Spain, but over… Italy?

• Trump’s relationship with Italian PM Giorgia Meloni isn’t doing so great after he said she had begged him for a photo and she denied it. Ahead of the summit, he mocked her, suggesting he needed a restraining order to keep her away.

• Fine, I'll say something. Abascal, who has avoided criticizing Trump in the past, this time called the comments “absolutely unacceptable” and warned that allies should not treat each other “like vassals”. Is Vox souring on Trump? 🤔

Begoña, literally grounded. A domestic subplot added an extra layer to the NATO drama. Begoña Gómez, the indicted wife of PM Sánchez, was denied permission to travel to Ankara to attend the summit due to ongoing legal troubles and restrictions, including the seizure of her passport two weeks ago.

• Not needed. Despite an official invitation, the court argued that her presence was not essential. However, the court let her travel to Britain to attend her daughter’s graduation, citing stronger judicial cooperation there in case she tried to flee.

• Not a table for two? When Sánchez landed in Ankara on Tuesday, he was given two bouquets of flowers — including one that local media said was for his wife. Hopefully, they make it alive to Madrid. 💐

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2. 📸 It’s a clothing line. It’s a PR campaign. It’s…DMOCRACIA!

Who says progressives can’t be fashionable?

A bunch of attractive influencers wearing unattractive brown-and-gray streetwear sweats vamping through the parliament building with classical-ish cello music in the background, ending with the slogan DMOCRACIA: “When you get dressed, you position yourself.”

• It seems pretty innocuous (if a little tacky), right? Well, it triggered a lotta people, most (though not all) on the right.

What’s the dealio? The campaign marks an anniversary the Sánchez government was determined to hit with a bang: 50 years since Franco’s death. The Spain in Freedom commission — a government body set up for the occasion — wanted to reach young Spaniards who didn’t live through the dictatorship and may not think much about it.

• Rather than a documentary, they hired streetwear designer Bnomio, recruited 32 influencers including Marina Rivers (2.2m Insta followers), shot a video inside the actual Congress chamber, and launched what looks exactly like a clothing brand — hoodies, sweats, the number “50” stitched on everything — called DMOCRACIA.

The government wants to be clear, though, that this is not a clothing brand but a PR campaign. Either way, it’s generated the controversy of an actual outré brand launch, and then some.

Two controversies, actually.

• The first? The shoot in Congress. It was approved by parliament’s (government-controlled) board — the government notes in its statement — but the right is treating it as institutional desecration nonetheless.

• And second, the cost. Media repeatedly cited €14.6m, which is actually the budget for the broader España en Libertad program. The DMOCRACIA campaign itself, the government says, cost “just” €386,000 — €185k for production, €193k for social media distribution, and €10k for design and creative direction.

Now for the best part. The clothes are not actually for sale. The limited run was made for events and influencer shoots only. Want a hoodie? Enter the giveaway — follow the government’s Instagram, like the post, share it to your stories, and you might be one of 20 lucky winners to receive a full kit. The Sánchez administration, in other words, is juicing its social media numbers using democracy-branded merch as bait.

• Which brings us to the obvious comparison. When Bad Bunny made his housing short film, it landed because it kinda felt like a genuine artist channeling something real. DMOCRACIA, whatever its intentions, feels like a government committee watching Conejo Malo and thinking, “Dude, we can do that.”

3. 🚨 Big week for famous crooks in Spain — one caught, one set free

You win some, you lose some. But there was a kind of poetic justice to it, or maybe a dharmic cosmic balance.

• What happened? El Pequeño Nicolás — convicted four times, 12+ years in combined sentences — avoided prison once again, while All Boivin, Canada’s most wanted man, was caught in Marbella.

First, Little Nicky. Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias became Spain’s most notorious con man in 2014, when he was 20 years old and had somehow infiltrated the inner circles of the Spanish state — hobnobbing with businessmen, attending official events, and turning up at the proclamation of King Felipe VI, where he was photographed with the monarch. 🤷

• Darling Nicky achieved all this while posing as an advisor to the CNI (like the CIA + FBI), the Presidencia del Gobierno, and basically any institution with impressive letterhead. He also arranged for a friend to take his university entrance exam in his name using a fake ID, which suggests his fraud was not particularly sophisticated.

Four convictions followed, and he received a combined 12+ years in prison. But but but… he has not spent a day in prison. This week, a Madrid court suspended his latest sentence — two years for accessing police databases — on the condition that he commits no crimes for four years and pays a fine of €1,800. 🤑

• On a side note. Nicky has played his notoriety into a cameo role in Torrente, presidente, the latest installment of Santiago Segura’s series, where, we must say, he was brilliant.

And then there’s All Boivin, who is not nearly as winningly harmless. Boivin, 36, ended up in Marbella after founding the North Savage Gang in Quebec — a breakaway from the Hells Angels that was triggered, in part, by his refusal to pay the bikers their 10% cut of drug proceeds. What followed was one of Quebec’s nastiest gang wars, including kidnappings, arson, shootings, and a dude in Montreal with a finger and a toe amputated.

• On the lam. Boivin, who’d been Canada’s most wanted for three years, with a $100,000 bounty on his head, was living in Marbella in a gated community. He barely left the house while he underwent laser sessions to remove identifying tattoos — “Gucci” and “MLN” on his neck — and wore long sleeves in the summer heat.

• How was he caught? Stupid did him in. His inner circle posted their location on social media, which, you know, no cop ever uses. Oh, wait. The Policía Nacional nabbed him, and he now faces life in prison.

We never knew! Canada, it turns out, does have mobsters. And they holiday in Marbella like everyone else.

4. ⚖️ The government’s mass regularization gets a legal reprieve — for now

Spain’s left-leaning government caught a break when the country’s right-leaning Supreme Court decided — for now — not to freeze its controversial mass immigrant regularization or send it to EU courts.

• What exactly happened? The Spanish Supreme Court’s Administrative Chamber handed the government’s regularization a significant — if conditional — victory yesterday, rejecting both a suspension of the program and a referral to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU).

• Which means? The 1.17 million applicants who filed under the scheme won’t see their cases frozen — at least not yet. Which they are probably pleased to hear.

The legal challenges came from four corners. The Community of Madrid, Aragón, and Valencia — all PP-led — and Vox, who argued the regularization breached EU migration law.

• But…the rules! The specific concern, raised by three of the court’s own judges in late June, was pointed. They noted that the decree grants residency permits to people already under expulsion orders, and archives those proceedings even where courts had confirmed them — potentially clashing with EU rules requiring member states to issue return decisions against irregular migrants.

Those aren’t trivial objections. And yet the full seven-judge panel decided — unanimously, with no dissenting votes — that referring the case to the CJEU is “not pertinent at this procedural moment.”

• The logic is procedural, but it makes sense. Since the court is not suspending the decree, there’s no urgency to fast-track a European ruling. The government had argued just that — that a referral would be premature before any full examination of the merits.

This is the second time the court has rejected suspension requests. It previously turned down Vox and Madrid in May. Each refusal is good news for the government, and this one closes the most dangerous immediate door, because a freeze while EU judges deliberated could have dragged on for months.

• But, but, but… The underlying legal challenges are still very much alive. The Supreme Court must still rule on the merits of all four challenges. And the court’s own note explicitly leaves the door open to a CJEU referral later on. The regularization proceeds, but the legal battle does not end.

Maybe not as bad as feared. Considering the right-leaning Supremo has ruled twice for the left-leaning government here, maybe Spain isn’t all lawfare, all the time, like some people think?

5. ☢️ You can now add ‘radioactive barrels off Spain’s coast are falling apart’ to your long list of worries

© Campagne NODSSUM, CNRS, Flotte océanographique française

Not to rain on your parade, but a new scientific expedition has confirmed that thousands of radioactive barrels dumped in the Atlantic Ocean off Spain’s coast are now in a worrying state of decay, which raises fresh concerns about the inevitable appearance of a Godzilla-like monster long-term environmental risks.

Wait… What?! Researchers from France’s CNRS have located and filmed some of the roughly 220,000 radioactive barrels dumped more than 40 years ago in the Atlantic trench, about 300 nautical miles from Cape Fisterra, in Galicia. Their findings: many of the containers are in an “advanced state of deterioration,” with some already leaking.

• What’s the worst that could happen? Between the late 1940s and the 1990s, several European countries (looking at you, U.K., France, etc.) used the deep Atlantic as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. The barrels, filled with radioactive materials sealed in cement, bitumen, or resin, were dropped to depths exceeding 4,000 meters.

• Exposed! The practice remained largely hidden until 1981, when a small Galician fishing boat, the Xurelo, sailed to the dumping zone and physically confronted ships discarding nuclear waste. The first images of the practice sparked international outrage, and that pressure led to a moratorium in 1983 and a full ban in 1993 under international law.

The worst has happened. The latest CNRS expedition confirms that some barrels are breaking down and releasing radionuclides into the surrounding environment. While measured radiation levels remain relatively low for now, they are higher than expected in the area. In other words, zombie fish are not here yet…but coming soon.

• If the barrels continue to degrade, radioactive substances could leak more widely, affecting local marine life and, over time, fisheries and coastal economies in northern Spain. These materials can persist in ecosystems for decades, accumulating in organisms and moving up the food chain. So… pretty bad.

What now? Should I move? Further lab analysis is underway, and pressure is mounting on the Spanish government to take a more active role.

• What’s next? Some political groups are already calling for a plan to assess whether the barrels can be safely removed, a complex and risky operation that could redefine this decades-old environmental problem. And it would not be at all expensive, right?

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