The Short Fuse

When you read this column, there’s a good chance I will already be in an Uber on the way to Barajas Airport again, Buenos Aires in my sights. It will be yet another crossing of the Atlantic — but not just another. In Argentina, 2025 is an election year, and what happens in the legislative contests will shape the country’s political, economic, and institutional trajectory. But that’s not all that weighs on my mind.

There’s a feeling — and it’s more than a feeling, it’s an intuition honed by years of political consultancy — that this won’t be the only election I witness up close this year. From where I stand, Spain should also be preparing to go to the polls.

Yes, I know: no elections are scheduled. But sometimes political urgency trumps the calendar. Because if Spain does not hold an election this year, what comes next will be worse: a government that, like any socialist administration in retreat, will try to carry the state off on its back. We are already seeing it: the boldness of the government grows as the fuse of a bomb that could go off at any moment grows shorter. They know it. That’s why they act now. Because later might be never.

In short, they are accelerating a deliberate attempt to infiltrate the state with loyalists, like someone planting landmines under the parquet floors. Harsh imagery? Appropriate. The play is not to govern better — it’s to guarantee impunity. And here, those surrounding Sánchez have a doctorate.

Am I exaggerating? Let’s think for a moment. Why does a government on its way out push so aggressively to control media, regulatory bodies, and spheres of power that once barely registered on its radar? Why the effort to shape the narrative, the agenda, the bureaucracy? Because planting as many agents as possible across the state apparatus is the last insurance policy when power is slipping away.

A wise Spanish journalist once said to me something I’ve never forgotten: “In Argentina, the state is corrupt down to its foundations. In Spain, only the political elite is corrupt; the middle ranks, the civil servants who serve citizens, are not.” What the PSOE is trying to do is extend that corruption from the top downward, to soak the state like red wine on a white carpet.

The objective: plant scattered patrols throughout every public office — loyal functionaries capable of hiding paperwork, delaying processes, or denying the existence of a document. Destroy evidence, cover the retreat. Sánchez needs to reinforce the rear guard far more than the attack front. He no longer has anything left to attack with. Fear is no fool; Sánchez doesn’t know where he will end up, and that’s what matters to him today.

He must be very careful, because a small miscalculation — instead of ending up in the Dominican Republic — could see him landing in Haiti. And that’s not the same thing, of course, even if it’s the same island.

Just look at their zeal to control the judiciary, to manipulate regulatory agencies, to turn public media into propaganda outlets. Watch the meticulous appointment of positions in key institutions — in all possible and even impossible places — trampling over every legal constraint. And above all, observe the tone: the ruling party no longer speaks to citizens; it speaks about the history it tells itself.

And that, when it occurs, is because it no longer expects to be voted back into office. It only wants to be allowed to escape with minimal damage.

Meanwhile, in Argentina, I will be reunited with a state long since colonized, dismantled, and rebuilt as a resonance chamber for whatever government happens to be in power. There, authority is used like a match: struck, it burns itself out and is discarded. That’s why the comparison is not fanciful. What Kirchnerism achieved in two decades, Sanchism is attempting in record time. As a seasoned Rioplatense humorist would say: “The bad thing is not that they leave — the bad thing is that before they go, they try to take even the doormat with them.”

Spain urgently needs general elections. Not because the calendar dictates it, but because the institutional body demands it. Not as ideological reproach, but as an institutional warning. When a government believes it is untouchable, it behaves as such. And if it also senses the end, it transforms into an occupying force. As Solzhenitsyn put it with surgical precision: “We know they lie. They know they lie. They know we know they lie. And yet they continue to lie.”

Spain needs a general election urgently. Not because the calendar says so, but because the institutional fabric is crying out for it. Because if we do not prevent the state from being infiltrated, the state will one day infiltrate democracy itself.

There comes a point in every political cycle when the dignity of institutions must prevail over the cunning of power. That moment is now. And if we fail to understand it, we risk living in an unrecognizable country — where the one who has lost governs, the one who governs does not command, and the state belongs not to everyone but to a few who do not intend to leave without taking everything with them.