Today You’ll Read Here Neither Pedro Nor Sánchez

As with Voldemort or a certain ex-footballer who flew off to Saudi Arabia for a mountain of petrodollars, everyone knows exactly whom we’re talking about. He’s still there. Clinging to the armchair with the same desperation as a wet cat hanging on to a curtain — except now, there is no curtain to cling to anymore.

This isn’t a parody with a script. It is an involuntary tragicomedy: a leading figure has lost his supporting cast, his script, and — most damningly of all — his audience.

In Brussels, Europe’s orchestra has stopped playing its silly Agenda 2030 melody. And the Spanish delegation wanders the corridors like that guest who arrives two hours late to the party with a bottle of cheap wine and then takes offence that there’s no food left.

Meanwhile, the government hangs together with rusted safety pins bought at a discount store that closed during the pandemic — the sort that have long lost any gripping strength. And yet they still insist on defending their legacy — a flexible concept that covers everything from an animal welfare law that might require you to hire a therapist for your canary to a fiscal pact with a party that doesn’t even believe in the state.

As he reviewed the roadmap, the government drove straight off the cliff — and, truth be told, that helped it enormously.

But now, something has begun to change.

In the midst of these dark political operettas, a small light flickered — timid at first — all the way down in Seville, when Alberto Núñez Feijóo emerged. With his calm voice, his registrar-office tone, and that Galician conviction that if a conflict can be avoided, it should be. They chose him. They gave him the keys to a battered car. Instead of accelerating, he buckled his seatbelt, adjusted the mirrors, hesitated, circled a few times, and didn’t find the road… But time — which seemed lost — ended up serving them.

Because while Feijóo fumbled with the roadmap, the government truly drove itself over the edge. And that, as remarkable as it may sound, helped clarify the moment.

Feijóo will not be Churchill. Nor does he need to be. Simply not being Rajoy is already progress. In his first phase, he looked more like a curling referee than a leader. But then he began to move. To speak more clearly. To say things that hit nerves. To sit with his own people. To clean house — however slightly. That, for the moment, is more than nothing.

He filled a Plaza de España in Madrid — an act that seemed fruitless at first — yet the party ritual now appears to have arrived at precisely the right moment, and some positive shifts are beginning to happen.

First: he brought in Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo. That’s no minor addition. Picture it: a party president who used to lose sleep over the face of Cuca Gamarra now finds himself chewing toast with tomato while listening to Cayetana speak. It’s a different world. The ovation she received upon her appointment suggests that the PP base no longer tolerates timidity. That’s revolutionary in today’s political climate.

Second: Isabel Díaz Ayuso publicly declared her support: “The party is yours; we’ll support you at every step.” In the PP universe, that’s the closest thing to a kiss on the lips — a historic blessing.

Now comes the hard part:

And if he doesn’t negotiate — more precisely, if he doesn’t talk to Abascal like an adult and not like a meticulous notary afraid of adjectives — everything could fall apart.

Feijóo may get a second chance, but he won’t have an absolute majority. That notion that he might reach ten million votes and stride proudly with impossible support — that’s a grave error. He won’t achieve it. He’s made mistakes that have inadvertently empowered Vox in the early months of his party leadership.

Is negotiating with Vox easy? Comfortable? Evidently not. Is it necessary? Absolutely. The center-right voter no longer wants explanations about why the left remains in power; they want change. And there are many things that need changing.

What Spain needs now is not theater but a brutal shift in direction — vast, sustained, and painstaking. And if achieving that requires finally putting aside old wounds and forging alliances… then perhaps, at last, they should just share that kiss