Hours before a terrorist commando murdered 133 people in cold blood at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, the big blow of the week was Russia’s bombing of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, highlighting the growing vulnerability of anti-aircraft defenses as a result of the partial blocking of American military aid. 2024 is being written one after another.
The terrorist attack in Moscow, quickly claimed by the Islamic State, has also shown that Vladimir Putin’s regime cannot guarantee complete security for Russian citizens in times of war. The film Ivan the Terrible, by the great Sergei Eisenstein, comes to mind again: while the tsar of all the Russias fights against the Livonians (Latvians), the Tatars attack from behind. Enraged, Tsar Putin is now trying to link the attack to Ukraine, and that sounds like us.
Dark storms are approaching and the advisers of the President of the French Republic wanted to spread some images of Emmanuel Macron furiously hitting a punching bag. Fury is the music of this era. Macron is in good physical shape and clearly conveys a message: France, the only nuclear power in the European Union, is ready to fight beyond diplomacy to avoid a collapse on the Ukrainian front before the summer. Macron’s poster also has an internal reading: it warns Marine Le Pen’s National Rally that it will be constantly reminded of its former ties to Moscow.
Faced with the photos of the French boxer, welterweight, Russia massively bombards Ukrainian power plants coinciding with the meeting of the European Council in Brussels; an Islamic commando returns terror to Moscow and the Tsar promises terrible revenge, trying to blame Ukraine. As I said to them, this sounds like us.
This is the tragic sequence of the week. It should be added that it is not the first time that the current tenant of the Elysee has exhibited his love of boxing. During the 2022 presidential campaign, the candidate Macron already exchanged some blows with a professional boxer in the Parisian park of Saint-Denis. Boxing seems to be all the rage in the French political environment. It is a sign of the times. To win you have to hit hard, really hard.
And this is precisely what happens in Spain, where the exchange of blows is increasingly frantic, with everyone rushing to get into the ring. They all want to face each other. Three consecutive elections in two months: Basque Country (April 21), Catalonia (May 12), European Parliament (June 9). And Madrid DF turned into a mud, with many people literally hysterical in the towers of the digital press.
Spanish politics does not want to box with Russia. They haven’t gone crazy in Madrid. They want to box exclusively with each other. There is no way Pedro Sánchez would allow himself to be photographed wearing gloves to send a warning message to Putin. Alberto Núñez Feijóo does not even mention the war in Ukraine in his speeches. The Popular Party and the PSOE are very eager to break each other’s faces, but they maintain a point in common, a cardinal point in common: they go with the brakes on European requirements for rearmament.
Sánchez has delegated the alarmist speech to Margarita Robles (see last Sunday’s La Vanguardia), while trying to orient the issue of rearmament towards the field of technological investment to present the strengthening of military budgets as a contribution to economic progress. Since he does not have a parliamentary majority for an explicit rearmament programme, the extension of the 2023 state budget spares him a discussion that would have been hellish two months before the European elections. And this helps us to understand that the Prime Minister did nothing to prevent the calling of early elections in Catalonia. The discussion on military spending will take place in the autumn, when the budgets for 2025 have to be debated, and we will see what the international situation will be then. The Popular Party, let’s face it, is not demanding that the PSOE talk about war. Since 2004, the PP has run away from the word war like a scalded cat.
In the Spanish ring, more has happened this week. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in low hours, turned into a puppet of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, has definitely distanced herself from a hypothetical candidacy for the presidency of the Government of Spain. The train pulls away from Puerta del Sol. If he does not make a mistake in the Europeans, Núñez Feijóo will consolidate himself as the leader of the right, while Santiago Abascal seems half hidden, as if he is afraid of something. It wasn’t this, the July 24 photo.
In Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, the Forgiven, will try to rebuild Democratic Convergence in the May elections, combining pragmatism, verbal radicalism and anti-socialism, the vital substance of the immortal convergent gene. This week, while Díaz Ayuso’s team was sinking into the mud, Feijóo publicly acknowledged that Esteban González Pons met Junts leaders in August. While bombarding the amnesty, the Spanish right is building a tunnel to be able to agree with Junts on the interruption of the legislature if Sánchez remains in the minority when he has to approve the rearmament budget.
It is not easy to summarize, the current moment, while Truffaut’s four hundred strokes fall and it seems that the world has definitely gone mad.
