The Seven Plagues of Spain

The biblical account in Psalm 78 tells that Egypt—proud and seemingly impregnable—did not experience its worst nightmare because of a foreign invasion or a military defeat, but because of something far more unsettling: a succession of seven plagues (rather than the ten described in Exodus). It was not an isolated misfortune; it was a chain reaction. Whenever it seemed that nothing worse could happen, something worse did. The Nile turned into blood, the frogs, the flies, the diseases, the hail, the locusts, and the death of the firstborn.

The punishment produced, among other things, enormous damage to agriculture. Something very similar is beginning to happen in Spain. It does not merely suffer its problems—it strings them together.

The first plague is normalized corruption. Not as an exception, but as a climate. Not as a scandal, but as scenery. Cases accumulate, names repeat themselves, networks protect each other. The debate is no longer whether corruption existed, but how long the noise will last before everything returns to its usual course. Corruption has ceased to be news and has become context. And when corruption becomes context, the problem is no longer judicial—it is structural.

Moral and cultural

To this persistent plague there is added, almost without anyone noticing, the second: the collapse of the capacity to govern. Incompetence seeps everywhere. Ministries turned into placement offices, cadres without experience, decisions improvised between kickbacks and favors. It is not even necessary for someone to steal for everything to function badly. It is enough that no one knows what they are doing. And when incompetence reaches critical infrastructure, things end badly.

Systems fail, services collapse, accidents no longer surprise anyone. Terrifying. They do not steal the train tracks simply because they run parallel and someone told them as children that parallel lines never meet. The third plague is no longer technical—it is moral. It is not only that people steal; it is what they steal for. Cocaine, prostitutes, state-run hotels. When public money dissolves into private vices, the problem stops being administrative and becomes cultural. And culture, as we know, is the hardest thing to reverse.

This third plague leaves a smell that can no longer be disguised with press releases.

Meanwhile, one might expect someone in the opposition to impose order. But no—Spain swallows the fourth plague. Spanish politics has perfected a curious modality: opposition that does not truly oppose. There is much talk about “putting one’s foot against the wall,” a very Spanish expression meaning to set a limit. But not even that happens. The Popular Party observes, nuances, hesitates.

Always soft and measured, it waits for political wear and tear to do the work it does not dare to do itself, while the public pays the bill. Vox is functional to this ineptitude that feeds it; it watches its belly grow, but does not look upward. It has a degree of power, but it does not exercise it.

A resigned society

The fifth plague is treacherous allies. Partners who sustain the government while suffocating it, who push its head under the water and lift it just enough for it to breathe. One gulp of air—and then back under again. The omnibus law is the perfect example: legislative packages where one or two key rules are always hidden beneath a mountain of filler. A classic manual of contemporary populism.

Groucho Marx would have summarized it effortlessly:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

And thus we reach the sixth plague, perhaps the most disturbing of all: the apathy of the electorate. A tired, resigned, anesthetized society. Spain endures. It endures everything. It endures corruption, incompetence, moral decay, parliamentary blackmail, hundreds of deaths. It endures because it sees no alternative.

And so, meekly, it lets things pass.

This apathy can be seen in small, everyday gestures. Today in Spain one has to cross oneself before entering a train carriage and then pray very quickly. And since no one wants to gamble with fate, many decide not to tempt luck and choose the car instead. Driving, even if it takes longer, even if it is uncomfortable. Another acceptance. The punctual, comfortable, fast train is no longer a national pride. Nor is the public healthcare system. So if you have an accident on the road, you know the problem may become serious.

Yet even so, you accept it. You accept everything. There the sixth plague appears in its purest form: generalized resignation. And then, as if something were still missing to complete the picture, the seventh plague appears: bad weather. Perhaps this final plague has arrived to awaken Spaniards with buckets of cold water. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the heaviest downpour has fallen in Galicia—not for all Galicians, of course, but for one of them. AEMET had announced a warm winter; red maps flooded the media.

Reality, once again, decided to contradict them. Cold, rain, snow. All sent by the One in heaven, who stands above the One in Iberia—no offense intended to the supreme figure of Sánchez. The Spaniard who avoided the train so as not to tempt fate finds that the road can also become a deadly trap. In other words: after the rain, the snow.

As Ortega y Gasset wrote,
“When a society becomes accustomed to living badly, it eventually comes to believe that this is normal.”

Spain seems dangerously close to that point. Unfortunately.