The Spanish Rubicon

From this columnist’s humble vantage point, Spain has crossed its Rubicon — not through a dramatic revolution but via a slow erosion of its institutions that has now morphed into a brazen transformation of its democratic system into something darker and structurally different.

What began as a gradual weakening of norms and restraint has reached the point where the political order itself is being rewritten. The original catalyst was not the usual ideological battles but an anachronistic centrist fixation that still befuddles the People’s Party (PP). Yet if we really want to speak plainly, the principal architect of this moment bears the name Pedro Sánchez.

And before any PSOE reader sets this opinion aside, rest assured: Mariano Rajoy had his part too. His tenure was defined by timidity — cautious, bureaucratic, and fearful of making waves. He governed as if politics itself were a technical exercise, surrendering the cultural battle by omission. He let the monster grow, and when the moment came to act, it was already too late. His vacuum became an opening that others filled — decisively, albeit toward disaster.

Let’s be clear: Sánchez is not an accident — he is a project. And not one of disruptive innovation unless disruption is synonymous with every-man-for-himself-in-a-collapsing-state.

Every authoritarian project depends on two limits. Sánchez has already crossed the first without difficulty: his own record. He is arguably the European politician with the greatest number of high-definition contradictions. He lied about things he swore he would never do — and then did them with a smile. He promised what he would never deliver — and failed enthusiastically.

The other limit — justice — remains intact, for now. Evidence accumulates daily, entangling him, his spouse, his brother, and his father-in-law. The only thing missing now is the family dog turning up involved in some commission scandal. If there’s an innocent relative left, please show yourselves — you’d be a genetic marvel.

And yet Sánchez endures. Many explain this endurance as a product of audacity, cynicism, or a total lack of scruples. He surrounds himself not with experts but with accomplices. He has turned the PSOE into a cadre of shameless figures and transformed it into a clientelist power machine more than a political party. But the truth is simpler: Sánchez persists because no one stops him.

Enter the opposition. The PP has become what the French might call a partenaire — a partner in the dance, setting the steps, yet never actually unsettling the lead. It is the opposition of good manners. It calls itself a “responsible opposition,” as if irresponsibility could somehow be less harmless.

Until that changes, there is no exit. And it’s not just parties that must change — it’s citizens, media, judges, and intellectuals. All seem more worried about not breaking the porcelain than about saving Spain. The opposition spars with adjectives while the other plays with institutional dynamite.

George Orwell warned us: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In Spain we have invented a domestic variant: corruption is empathy, lies are strategy, and the opposition is decoration.

Sánchez has an uncanny neurological wiring: lovely words pass straight from the left ear to the right ear without ever touching his brain. He remains free to focus on what really matters: staying in power and securing impunity.

Unless he is confronted with hard political blows — weapons the PP has but refuses to use — when he finally leaves office in 2031, Spain will be poorer, more divided, more frightened, and much less free than it is today.

Cicero once wrote: “Freedom, when it is lost, does not always make a sound; sometimes it slips away with a silk step.”Let no one say we did not see it coming.