About the new generation of nationalist, populist and authoritarian leaders who have become a government alternative.

More than a pink wave, what seems to be moving through Latin America is a tsunami of dissatisfaction. Citizens want change and that is what the politicians now in power offered.

El País, Ideas Cover.

I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid's Tale. Theocratic dictatorships do not lie only in the distant past: There are a number of them on the planet today. What is to prevent the United States from becoming one of them? If jusctice Alito whants you to be governed by the laws of the 17th century, you should take a close look to that century. Is that when you whant to live?

By Margaret Atwood

With a worsening international environment, Russia has become an indispensable partner for China's ambitions. From a geopolitical point of view, Beijing sees no other option but to protect its relationship with Moscow. And it is increasingly willing to bear financial or reputational costs to pursue its grand strategic goals.

China has too much to lose and little to gain if things get out of hand in the Eastern country. Its project of world hegemony would not survive a misstep that would lead the United States to take advantage of its military superiority.

Ethical decay is also increasingly apparent in the “woke” left, which has become increasingly authoritarian and intolerant as it advocates permissiveness for all forms of sexual and ethnic identity – except one. By Slavoj Zizek.
El País. Ideas.

One consequence of polarization is that each election is presented to citizens as an eschatological battle between good and evil, an effective strategy but one that ends up legitimizing the uprising against legality.

By dint of acting as if each election were, in effect, a final fight, it should not be ruled out that this fight will come, especially when the nuclear threat has made an appearance.

About the sentimentalist sacralization of the victim and the propagation of a victimization policy that leads us to a "permanent competition for the privilege of grievance".

Many women risk their health while being encouraged to nurture the business of assisted reproduction, an industry in which the ovaries are pushed to the limit of their nature to expel eggs and money.

By Marina Pérezagua

On the regional elections in Andalucia.

In the war in Ukraine there is another battlefront that has nothing to do with the bombs: the narrative before public opinion. The struggle is between the legitimation before the world of national populism or the rebound of democracies.

Colombia has too often been a country where it is preferred not to shake too much the facts of the past, lest the ghosts return. The report wants to advance the idea that remembering – remembering everything and remembering it accurately – is the only way to heal wounds.

Article by Jaun Gabriel Vásquez

The result of the elections opens a panorama more similar to the end of a regime than to the birth of a new era, like the one promised three years ago by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The media are key actors in the framing of common issues and play a fundamental role in shaping polarized public debates. It is inconceivable that a politician maintains traditional styles if the media environment through which he transfers his messages has changed and tension and polarization prevail.

Zuckerberg's metaverse is just the culmination of the mental disembedding of urban middle classes whose economy, whose emotions and self-esteem have been developing for years in technological confinement, parallel to trees, mountains and bodies. [...] If we are making the trip to the final accident by plane and we cannot stop in the air, can we do something? We can land.

"The challenge is to contribute to stripping past and present of the idea of fatal belonging and remembering —celebrating it, from my point of view— the hybrid, mestizo character of what we are or believe we are in a world that, failing to dissolve them in the air, is sick of fixed and exclusive identities, obsessed with them."

The human cost of the conquest of America or of the colonial action in Africa are waiting for their place in school textbooks or in museums. This was the policy of an imperial monarchy, with which the current nation-state has little to do. We could clearly disassociate ourselves from those actions (...). But we continue projecting ourselves backwards, identifying ourselves with some characters and political entities that have disappeared, (...) contrasting pink legends with black legends.

Over the decades, the values that drive him have been totally constant and the policies he is proposing now are similar to those he has defended for decades. What is extremely different is the scale. It is as if a company that manufactured recreational boats started to make transatlantic ships.

The contempt for institutions and the trivialization of rules and language end badly; the transfers of power must crystallize the legitimacy of the system; and the ineffectiveness of democracies outweighs authoritarianism.

The constituent elections in Chile is the latest chapter in a plot that, like a television series with many seasons, maintains the tension with unexpected twists.

Text by Alejandro Zambra

The most serious crises demand the most ambitious solutions. We must work together for an inclusive model that allows all countries to fight the pandemic and defend shared values.

I propose a pact to stop paying attention to those who are all day issuing certificates of ideological virginity, authenticity in the representation of the people or political integrity.

We are more confused and disoriented than ever. Great narratives have been replaced by what algorithms tell us, and the end of the road is a broken society.

Article by Joseph S. Nye

On the Spanish justice degradation.

An out-of-date Malthusianism is relieved to see that a large proportion of those killed by the virus have been elderly. Article by Adela Cortina.

Public television in Poland has become a disgusting propaganda organ that has multiplied its activity due to the official fear of the result of the presidential elections. Article by Timoty Garton Ash.

Article by Bill Gates. "Pandemics remind us that helping others isn't just the right thing to do; it's also the smart thing to do. In this pandemic we are all connected. Our response must be too".

Extremely hard article by Alastair Campbell about Boris Johnson's disastrous management of the crisis generated by covid-19.

On the loss of physical freedom and democratic rights during confinement due to the emergence of covid-19. The author gives the example of US, where postposing the presidential elections has been considered.

Governments that manage the health crisis have the obligation to justify any restriction of freedom, showing its usefulness in order to contain the pandemic, in the same way that any aspiration to recover spaces of freedom has the obligation to justify that it is not incompatible with the general objective of containing the pandemic.

The helth crisis expands power in our institutions and normalizes social harassment. We have a citizen patrol behind each courtain.

A second term of Donald Trump in the White House would have disastrous implications for the European Union.

Opinion article about populist leaders who, in absence of better ideas, promote confrontation as a useful instrument to gain power.

About the universe or the spanish writer Ana María Matute. Published in Babelia, El Pais cultural supplement. 

Report by M. Ceberio Belaza and J.A. Aunión.