🧐 This Week in Spain: The Far-Right is Coming (to Town)
Also: Barcelona officially quits X (sorta), Ryanair is mad at the government and Benidorm Fest stuff.
By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | January 30, 2025 | Madrid | Issue #87
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🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: So far Spain seems to be a secondary priority to the Trump White House (which probably explains why Elon Musk still hasn’t come out to explicitly support Vox). But that doesn’t mean that the European far-right isn’t trying to make itself at home here, as evidenced by the Patriots summit taking place in Madrid in a few days.
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Those were the days
🍟 It’s a Trump World. Spain’s Just Living in It
We know what PM Pedro Sánchez must be thinking right now: “Oh, how quickly things change.” Seriously, one day you’re the darling of the European left, Mr. Handsome, walking the streets with Finnish PM Sanna Marin like socialism’s Barbie and Ken dream date, and the next your every move depends on the permission of a separatist leader with a bad Beatles mop-top, and far-right leaders Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen are invading your city with a rally named—seriously—”Make Europe Great Again.” Pedro, we feel for you.
It had already been a tough stretch for Sánchez—and the rest of the European left—before Donald Trump took office. The EU started turning right as Italy brought in Giorgia Meloni as PM (from the Brothers of Italy, no less!), leftist buddy António Costa was turfed out as Portuguese PM in a dubious corruption scandal, Finland’s Marin was replaced by a man from the liberal-conservatives… The winds of change were really shifting.
But Trump's ascension to the American throne last week drove it home. Suddenly Spain’s government wasn’t just an outlier, but it was increasingly out of step with a world moving hard right. The new American government, and the European right-wing leaders it emboldened, are hostile to most of what Sánchez holds dear. Let us count the ways that things are changing…
MEGA. The newly created EU far-right party Patriots for Europe, designed by Orbán, was founded after the 2024 elections to make the new right a powerbase in Brussels, and it already holds 86 of the EU parliament’s 720 seats. That makes it the third biggest group, and it counts Spain’s Vox as a member. Now it’s ready to throw its weight around with a major Trump-inspired rally in Madrid on Feb. 8. Remember when Argentine President Javier Milei came to town and insulted Sánchez at a far-right rally in May? Well, that will look tiny compared to this show of hard-right strength.
Programming note: We would like to remind the MEGA posse that this is Spain. First, the rally should be done by 2 p.m., so everyone can get to lunch. And, two, it should have a name in Spanish. (We suggest a manly one—Haz Europa Grande Otra Vez, or HEGOV. You’re welcome).
Bombs and stuff. The Netherlands’ old liberal PM Mark Rutte was in Madrid this week in his new role as NATO head. Now, in the past Spain would have said something like it was “deeply committed” to NATO and then moved on without spending much on weapons because, hey, it’s a peaceful country and who’s gonna invade—Andorra? Which explains why Spain is at the back of the line with defense spending, at 1.29% of GDP. But now with Trump suggesting European countries spend not just the 2% on defense as NATO countries agreed back in 2006, but 3% or even 5%, well, that’s not with the times. Still, when Rutte came, Sánchez said Spain would definitely get to 2%…in 2029. That might get a semi-pass from Rutte, but when Trump next throws a NATO defense spending tantrum, Spain is sure to be in the crosshairs.
Snappy sloganeering. While Orbán et al want to “Make Europe Great Again”, Sánchez continues his own efforts to devise catchy slogans that make for great headlines and antagonize Trump and his techno-bro financiers. Last week in Davos he unveiled his content moderation-heavy plans to “Make Social Media Great Again” (MaSoMeGA?) and dissed the “tecno-casta” (Read: Musk et al), while this week, he had a direct riposte to the “Drill, baby, drill” promise Donald Trump made in his inaugural speech.
Still pushing the green? Yup. Speaking at a clean energy event in Madrid, the PM said that Spain’s leadership in green hydrogen and renewable energy is turning this country into “green, baby, green”. While Trump may push for fossil fuels, he says Spain is betting its future on green energy (56% of electricity already comes from renewables). Though we’d like to point out the “green” is not really a verb.
Crickets. 🦗 At the end of the day, despite Pedro Sánchez’s recent attempts to antagonize Trump, it looks like the White House is simply ignoring Spain altogether—at least when Trumps’s not mistaking Spain for a member of the BRICS economic bloc.
Hello? Hello? As El Mundo explains, in the new U.S. administration’s initial round of diplomatic contacts, neither Trump nor any of his cabinet members have talked to their Spanish counterparts (such as Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, whose short stature in no way means he should be ignored).
What makes them so cool? Here in Europe, Hungary, Poland, and Italy—countries all governed by Trump-friendly leaders—have been contacted by the White House. Same with France and Germany, which are big. Heck, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even already spoken to his counterparts in Morocco and Rwanda. Maybe he lost Albares’s number?
Don’t worry, Spain will get targeted soon enough. The obvious ideological divide between Trump and Sánchez is certain to complicate bilateral relations further. Their very different worldviews have contributed to a lack of alignment on all sorts of international issues and considering the PM’s positioning lately, a clash between the two is now not a matter of if but of when. Likely first clash? We’re guessing that 1.29%.
More news below. 👇👇
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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week
1. 👋 Barcelona says goodbye to Twitter/X (almost)
The Barcelona City Council announced this week that it was leaving Twitter / X because it no longer ensures the right to “truthful and honest information”. Mayor Jaume Collboni, from the PSC Catalan socialists, is signing a decree that makes the closure official on Jan. 31.
Bad Elon! Collboni says that the platform has become trapped in “a spiral of disinformation and intransigence that directly threatens democracy” so they are closing the city’s nearly 80 official accounts. Back in September, he deleted his personal account.
But… The only account to remain open will be @bcn_ajuntament, used for emergency alerts (such as weather updates, etc.). So, not totally leaving. But…close.
They love some moderation. Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor, María Eugenia Gay, also said that Twitter’s drastic reduction in content moderation (or “censorship” as Tesla Boy would say) was one of the reasons they decided to go.
We’ll always have LinkedIn. The city said it would continue providing information to the public through Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram, and YouTube.
We’re #1! With this decision, Barcelona becomes Spain’s first major city to leave Elon Musk’s social media platform, following local institutions such as the University of Barcelona and the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities, and government leaders like Second Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, who last week announced she was abandoning Twitter/X and moving to BlueSky (though, really, no one noticed).
Not everyone is happy about this. The announcement has angered pretty much everyone in the opposition (surprise!). For one thing, the decision to stop posting on official city Twitter accounts (with their massive audiences) affects everything from the Barcelona’s Fire Department to its municipal archive and the archaeology service.
The leader of the center-right PP on Barcelona’s City Council, Daniel Sirera, called it a “mistake” and said they have a mayor “who finds it easier to shut down Twitter than to close down drug dens in Barcelona”. Troll-tastic!
The lefty separatist party ERC also appeared to be surprised by the fact that the mayor had not discussed this with anyone before announcing the decision and asked for a clear exit plan.
Center-right national separatist Junts accused the mayor of not consulting with the City Council beforehand. Councilman Jordi Martí said the X account is “an institutional tool, not a government asset”, and questioned why Barcelona is leaving X while staying on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram (which is a fair point, considering they just got rid of their fact-checking program).
And last but not least Vox councilman Gonzalo de Oro called the move “authoritarian and absurd” because the City Council’s social media accounts “do not belong to Collboni and the Socialist Party”
Sleepy, not dead. Now, while De Oro is technically correct, the city government will not delete the official accounts but rather leave them inactive, so whenever political winds change, the accounts could be reactivated.
2. 🔢 Happy econ stats week for Sánchez!
Embattled PM Pedro Sánchez has a statistics week to die for. His government may be unable to pass any legislation (except by decree) and he may be wildly unpopular among large swathes of the population (including in his own party), but at least the economy is rockin’, right?
Seriously, it is, especially compared to the rest of the EU today. Two important stats tell the story.
Employment and unemployment. National employment figures for 2024, published Tuesday, showed the unemployment rate dropped to 10.6%—the first time under 11% since the 2008 financial crisis (Really? Yes. As they say, “Nothing to be proud of”)—and the number of employed people hit a record 21,857,900, a rise of 468,100 for the year.
GDP (or PIB, if you prefer it in Spanish). Spain’s economy grew 0.8% in the last three months of 2024 and 3.2% for the year, according to stats published Wednesday, which puts it (editor checks stats for accurate description) waaaay crazy ahead of the rest of the eurozone, which is expected to grow 0.8% for the whole year.
Enhorabuena, Pedro et al. Really, it’s only fair to give some credit to the government that was in office when this happened. Indeed, the economic advisors of America’s Big Orange President have pointed to 3% as the annual GDP growth they are aiming for, so…congrats. But positive economic stats don’t win elections (just ask Kamala Harris), so let’s dig into the “Yes, buts…” of these numbers.
Tourism. While the job numbers were super-fab, nine of every ten new jobs were in services, driven especially by the hospitality industry (i.e. tourism), which was up more than 140,000. Similarly, GDP growth was driven by services, which grew 3.9%, propelled by tourism. Now, you can’t laugh at tourism in Spain—it accounts for 13% of GDP and a record 94 million tourists came to Spain last year—but you know how it’s gotten super-unpopular recently, right?
Wages. There are a lot more jobs, but the pay’s not great. Monthly wages are up about 15-20% since 2020 but inflation is up…about 20% too.
So Spain has tourism dependency and wage problems? We hear you: tell us something new. So let’s just revel in the good numbers, and be thankful for immigration: almost 90% of the new job growth (and a good bit of the GDP expansion) was due to immigrants.
3. 👷 37.5-hour workweek is 1 step closer—but still far away
Yolanda Díaz can say she notched a win on Monday. That’s when Díaz, the Labor Minister (and Second Deputy Prime Minister), won her long squabble with Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo (can we make “Carl Body” a thing?) over reducing Spain’s work week from 40 to 37.5 hours. Her draft law (anteproyecto de ley)—2.5 hours less per week but for the same pay!—will be voted on, and inevitably passed, during next Tuesday’s cabinet meeting.
Slow walking. You may recall that we wrote about this a few weeks ago when she went to the press with her complaints that Cuerpo was slow-walking her proposal because the PSOE didn’t want to pass it (she is of the far-left Sumar, and the PSOE is in theory slightly more business-friendly).
“Bad person.” During her media rant, Díaz trashed Cuerpo on Telecinco, where she said Cuerpo was “vetoing” the bill and lying when he said he wanted to pass the law: “I find this very serious because it is a commitment of the Government of Spain.” She also called Cuerpo a “bad person”! 😨
But now she’s happy. In a press swing this week, Díaz told RNE public radio, that “the PSOE had a different position regarding the reduction of the working day, but the debate is settled and the Government is going to approve this reduction."
So that’s it, right? Wrong. Cuerpo and the PSOE may just be giving Díaz a pacifier to sell to voters, knowing that there’s a big chance it will not come to fruition. After a draft law like this is passed by the cabinet it still has to be approved by the full parliament, which can modify the proposal or trash it. The bill is expected to be presented in parliament in April or May. And, well, approval is far from definite.
Díaz herself sorta admitted it. In her interview with RNE, she said, “Let's see if politicians do the same as they did with the labor reform” – which got 'no' votes from the PP, Junts, ERC and the PNV, among others – “or if they side with the Spanish men and women."
Business not on board. If even one of those nationalist parties—Junts, ERC and the PNV—vote “no” along with the PP and Vox, it won’t pass. And the fact that the business lobby wasn’t involved in writing the bill suggests that the more business-friendly ones (Junts and the PNV) might just give it a 👎. Or at least introduce a lot of changes, such as subsidies for small businesses and the like.
And if it passes? It should go into effect by the end of 2025. What will you do with your extra 2.5 hours?
4. ✈️ Ryanair CEO: ‘Spain has a crazy communist minister’
We hate Ryanair. Let’s be honest. Hatehatehatehatehate. Fine, we got that out of the way. But that said, Ryanair does have low prices if you bring, like, zero baggage (more on that in a second), and CEO Michael O'Leary really gives good value when it comes to starting public feuds we love to watch with a little 🍿.
Which brings us to… CommunistMinisterWhats-His-Name-Gate.
How it started. O’Leary went 🦇💩 crazy back in November when Spain levied €179m in fines on Ryanair (€108m) and two other airlines for “abusive” baggage and seating charges (yes, we find them abusive too). O’Leary disagreed with Spain (and us) and said the “illegal and baseless” fines “destroyed the ability of low-cost airlines to pass on cost savings to consumers via lower fares.”
Then it got even testier. Ryanair announced in mid-January that it would cut 800,000 seats on seven regional Spanish routes due to "excessive" fees from state-owned airport operator Aena, to which Aena pushed back, calling out Ryanair’s "notorious, dishonest, aggressive and threatening business and communications strategy, which it is difficult not to interpret as blackmail.”
…and testier. O’Leary did not move on, and it seems Spain didn’t either. It came out Wednesday that Transport Minister Oscar Puente had written a very unhappy letter to a Ryanair exec about the airline’s “threatening and somewhat insolent” tone.
How it’s going. And so, O’Leary took the opportunity of a Wednesday Brussels press conference about a totally different subject to slam Spain’s consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy (who fined Ryanair) as a “crazy communist” who wants to fine airlines for restricting baggage which they have “no choice” but to do. (To be fair to O’Leary, Bustinduy is with Sumar, so he is communist-adjacent; But crazy? We don’t know.)
And the “commie’s” response? Bustinduy—whose name we had to look up because we had never heard of him and thought he might be a minister in France—took to the spotlight like, um, an unknown politician that is forced to take the spotlight. His words: "No blackmail and certainly no insult will make me stop trying to defend the people against the powerful.” So righteous! Spain’s very own JFK.
5.🎙️Who will win this year’s Benidorm Fest?
At least 50% of the team that writes this newsletter is a huge fan of the drama and music that surround the Benidorm Fest each year (fine, it’s
). Its 2025 edition, happening now and broadcasting the music festival’s grand finale this Saturday night, will probably not disappoint.For those of you normies who have no idea what we’re talking about, the Benidorm Fest is the musical event of the year (at least for some of us), whose winner is selected to represent Spain in the Eurovision music contest (but that’s another can of worms so we’re staying away from that—for now).
Look, let’s face it. We’ve surely already lost. In recent years, except for that one time in 2022, Spain just doesn’t seem to find the right fit for Eurovision. This doesn't mean that all of the chosen songs are bad (Blanca Paloma’s Eaea is simply incredible) but they just don’t seem to do it for a European (well, global) audience.
As many music fans in Spain say, the best way to enjoy Benidorm Fest is by not thinking of Eurovision and just going along for the ride. Vote what you like, and then we’ll deal with it (which is why we always lose).
But we digress. The first semifinal of Benidorm Fest took place on Tuesday night, with eight contestants delivering some high-energy performances.
Only four of them survived the vote and moved to the next round: Kuve, Lachispa, Daniela Blanco and Lucas Bun. Don’t worry if you don’t know any of them, most of us didn’t know them either until now.
If we had to pick the best one from those four, with go with Bun’s deeply moving ballad “Te escribo en el cielo”. But if we had to pick the one to have a chance at Eurovision, we’d go with Blanco’s “Uh nana”.
Did we have a few trainwrecks on Tuesday? You betcha, particularly veteran Eurovision hopeful duo Sonia y Selena, who you may know from 2001’s dance-pop hit Yo quiero bailar. They tried to make it to the international song contest back then and failed, then split up. They got back together in 2011, tried and failed again (and split up again). And finally, they came back one last time this Tuesday (even though they allegedly hate each other) for one more try with an underwhelming - but campy - song, ‘Reinas’. They were immediately voted out, although the inevitable memes comparing them to Wicked’s Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo live on in our hearts.
The second semifinal is tonight at 10:45 p.m. and it will complete the lineup for the big final on Saturday night.
Here are some of the most interesting options competing tonight:
Public broadcast RTVE has made key changes to the voting system this year, eliminating the controversial “demoscopic jury”, giving the professional jury and the public equal power. Also, people can now vote for their favorite performer for free using the RTVE Play app.
With these new voting rules, expectations are high, especially because Spain has not won a Eurovision contest since 1969. Stay tuned to see whether we have a chance in Switzerland this year or if we are headed for yet another night of disappointment.
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Love it. I live in Valencia.