This has been a week of clarification. Two credible polls, the one published by La Vanguardia in two installments (Sunday and Monday), and the one released by the newspaper El País on Monday, surveys conducted by the companies Ipsos and 40dB, indicate that the right is clearly ahead, but that the PSOE is not sinking. Additionally, 60% of Spaniards consider that judges are not being politically neutral. That impression is stronger in some cases. Ladura condemns José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García raises less suspicion than the tortuous investigation to which Begoña Gómez, wife of the Prime Minister, is being subjected.
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There is political stress in society. And that stress is capitalized by Vox, which today could reach over 60 deputies and become the guiding party of a right-wing majority in Spain. The guiding party is the one that sets the main lines, the one that pushes, the one that drags, and the one that has the most powerful allies abroad. Vox today has direct communication with the United States government, is weaving a powerful network of contacts and complicities with the rightward shift in Latin America, and has good allies in Europe awaiting the 2027 electoral agenda: presidential elections in France, legislative elections in Spain, Italy, and Poland. The future of the European Union will be decided there. Within a year, Vox may have very powerful levers around it. That is why it is rising. Its voters no longer see it as a marginal party in which to cast a fickle protest vote. Vox is already part of the real existing power.
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The Popular Party remains below the results of July 2023, and an unidentified force seems to support the Socialist Party, which could be in the dumps if there were an interesting alternative to its left. The recurring PSOE does not sink because there is nothing to its left; an empty convent where the wind beats doors and windows. The mother superior has fled, Gabriel Rufián, the smartest of all, a character from Galdós, has taken the chapel’s ciborium, and whispers and litanies are heard in some cells. A convent of Mendizábal’s disentailment. The PSOE does not collapse because there is an invisible hand holding it.
JUDICIAL CAUTIONS. If an invisible hand guided the main movements of the high magistracy and the police units that investigate, narrate, and leak the most notorious cases, those that can most influence the outcome of future elections, Judge Juan Carlos Peinado would have long ago been removed from the Begoña Gómez case. Peinado unravels at night what others weave by day. There is no invisible hand, there is a dynamic: those who can do, do; but some do it badly. And others do not want to be left out of the game. The National Court judge Antonio Piña has just opened proceedings to investigate whether in some of the audios of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, the delirious and enormous collection of Villarejo audios, there are indications that could implicate the former secretary general of the Popular Party, María Dolores de Cospedal, in the Kitchen case, whose trial is concluding. At the time, Cospedal managed to be excluded from the case. Villarejo’s material was discarded. Now the judge wants to re-examine it, perhaps to close the matter again. In the current coordinates, Kitchen is a very delicate matter. There is no Leire Díez case without Kitchen. People observe and evaluate symmetries. It is not at all far-fetched to suppose that the trial of Begoña Gómez could be postponed until after the general elections. Next Thursday, July 16, we will all be waiting for the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the Amnesty law. The courts set the pace of Spanish political life.
Vox is becoming the guiding party of the right, with a strong international agenda
THE ANKARA SUMMIT. What invisible hand moved Donald Trump to spare Pedro Sánchez at the recent NATO summit in Ankara (Turkey), after having threatened to cut all commercial relations with Spain? It is no secret, Spain will buy more American weaponry for Ukraine, and has confirmed it will join a NATO deployment in the Arctic region of Finland. Trump has given the thumbs up, and Sánchez has been more restrained than last year at the The Hague summit. The theatrical president of the United States is already campaigning for the midterm elections in November and has preferred to sell that the Spaniards have yielded to pressure. The Spanish right does not want to campaign on this issue, not even Vox, so Sánchez came out unscathed from Ankara. There is no invisible hand. It is a dynamic. Trump appears today as a worn-out and erratic figure. Even Santiago Abascal takes some distance to defend his friend Giorgia Meloni. Iran has damaged the American president. He no longer generates the narrative tension of a year ago. Waiting for November.
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ARGÜELLO AND THE GANG OF THIEVES. What invisible hand has pushed Luis Argüello, archbishop of Valladolid and president of the Episcopal Conference, to break the conciliatory discourse that permeated the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Spain a month ago? Argüello has political instinct. Before entering the seminary once he finished his law degree, he sympathized with the left. He attended PCE rallies. He is a man with political drive in his head. You either have it or you don’t. His intellectual friends are today in Vox and he sees a change of majority coming. Argüello, who is not a cardinal, who has no position in Rome, senses the proximity of a propitious moment for the Catholic Church in areas such as education and in sensitive matters such as abortion and euthanasia. Not everything will revolve around immigration. The Vatican will need a manager with the PP-Vox majority if the political shift takes place in Spain. Argüello has said “I am here!”, but he has not properly gauged the impact. He likes frontal combat. Maybe too much.
What prevents the PSOE from sinking? The people, the fear of the void on the left
CATALONIA. The third serious poll of the week is the Catalan CEO’s, which confirms the underlying trend. The stress is capitalized by the far right, also in Catalonia. Aliança Catalana and Vox could add up to 30% in elections to the Parliament of Catalonia, a percentage not recorded in any other autonomous community. Aliança Catalana and Vox are very far apart, but they can also be very close. They are quantum particles. Both parties will tend to an agreement. If Aliança Catalana does not run in the next general elections, part of its possible votes will go to Vox. In the Catalan elections, AC will ask for the return of the loan. In an interview with La Vanguardia published in November 2025, Santiago Abascal anticipated that possible scenario: “There is a common concern. There is an important enemy who wants to destroy our society and does not respect women. I believe that the rejection of massive immigration of people influenced by Islamic fanaticism will unify Spain.”
What would happen in Catalonia if in upcoming elections to the Parliament, Aliança Catalana, Junts, Vox, and the PP reached an absolute majority?
That will depend, among other factors, on the resistance capacity of the Socialist Party. An invisible hand is holding it at this moment. Whose hand is that? That hand belongs to a broad social wave. Many people do not want the total collapse of the left in Spain. Not yet.
