The Problem Is Not Sánchez, It’s Us

Spain is no longer merely wrestling with a political issue — it is confronting a deep social crisis, one that outstrips scandal and enters the realm of collective consciousness and civic perception. What the columnist calls a crisis “of collective awareness, perception, and civic intelligence” suggests that Spaniards have become **as much a part of the problem as the political class they criticise.”

From the outset, the column argues that the implosion of Sánchez’s political project has been spectacularly humiliating: what once constituted the broader “sanchismo” now “fits in a car; today it could fit in a van” — reduced to figures imprisoned or officially entangled, symbolic more of decay than of power. Yet Sánchez himself, the piece observes, roams aimlessly, like a driver waiting for a GPS signal that might finally point him toward relevance instead of retreat.

But the core claim of the column is not about Sánchez alone — it is about Spanish society itself. The author asserts that significant portions of the population believe they are informed simply because they consume state media, talk shows, and militant punditry, yet they remain trapped in what feels like a self-reinforcing echo chamber of propaganda disguised as reasoning. The result is a public that assumes it is thinking critically, but in reality participates in a feedback loop of superficial outrage and scripted indignation.

Alongside this “informed” class, there are others: those who do not want to think at all, passing their hours absorbed in trivial entertainment; the indifferent, distracted by sport or consumer distraction; and the overburdened, struggling with everyday life — rent, inflation, children’s needs — for whom political leadership and institutional corruption are secondary concerns.

Perhaps most troubling are the young, described here as awake and full of rage — yet disillusioned with traditional politics. Unlike their elders, their anger is not channelled into established party demonstrations because they do not believe in the system at all; they instinctively ask not how to reform it, but whether it should be exploded. Their target, as the column notes, is not merely Sánchez or the PSOE, but a broader system of generational decline, where they face living worse than their parents.

Meanwhile, the main opposition — embodied by Alberto Núñez Feijóo — continues to rely on traditional rallying points and marches, yet without meaningful resonance or sense of direction. The piece suggests that the real irony is that Feijóo could become prime minister, not through strategic brilliance or electoral appeal, but simply because Sánchez’s own collapse might carry him forward by default.

Ultimately, the columnist concludes, the problem is no longer “who governs,” but who we are — a population divided in how it recognises its own desperation and yet unprepared for the day after Sánchez, Feijóo, or any individual political figure. This is a diagnosis not of political leadership alone but of societal self-perception and the collective capacity to think, engage, and act beyond echoes and distractions.