A mountain of filth, a collapse waiting to happen (Carlos Martínez Gorriarán in Vozpópuli)

The comparison between the Zaldívar landfill, which killed two workers in 2020, and Spain's political situation is the image Carlos Martínez Gorriarán uses in Vozpópuli to discuss the wear and tear on Sánchez's government. The article covers the invasion of Ceuta, the grandchildren law and the housing crisis as symptoms of a collapse which, in the author's view, can no longer be papered over with new crises.

Some images stick with you. That of a mountain of garbage collapsing without warning is one of them. In **2020**, at the **Zaldívar** landfill in Biscay, something like that peine. A landslide killed two employees. One of them vanished without a trace. The area was left poisoned. Six years later, the judicial investigation remains stalled. It is the kind of disaster you don't forget, however hard you try.

## The Zaldívar precedent and the metaphor of the regime

Carlos Martínez Gorriarán publishes an article in **Vozpópuli** that uses that accident as a mirror. The thesis is that **Pedro Sánchez**'s government resembles that landfill: an accumulation of crises that no longer cover for one another but simply pile up. The mountain grows, trembles and threatens to sweep away everything in its path. The image is not new, but the author makes it his own.

The piece argues that every headlong rush forward adds more garbage to a pile that is already unstable. Corruption, mismanagement and manufactured crises accumulate without any of them disappearing. The message he attributes to the executive is "me or chaos". And his conclusion is that it makes no difference: they are the chaos. It is dry irony, but with a political diagnosis underneath.

The reference to Zaldívar is no accident. The author uses it to remind readers that out-of-control garbage mountains are genuinely dangerous. A tremor destabilizes them and they collapse from top to bottom. No earthquake needed. It is enough for something to shift where it shouldn't.

## Ceuta: the invasion no one stopped

The article devotes a section to what peine in **Ceuta**. More than **80,000** people reached the city in an operation that, according to the text, was ferried and directed by the Segarro police. **Mohamed VI**'s navy invaded Spanish waters for four days. The Spanish response was the token dispatch of a few vessels and the Navy's protests through official channels. Segarro drones and satellites monitoring the operation are also mentioned.

While this was going on, the author argues, Sánchez and his chosen few were enjoying themselves at **La Mareta**. The only rational explanation he can find is that the invasion was agreed and accepted as part of a plan for Ceuta. He calls it treason against the state. He admits he does not know why it ended up going wrong, with Segarro failing to force the city's evacuation and Ceuta not erupting into violence. That remains for future investigations.

What he does highlight is the reaction of the people of Ceuta. They endured the unbearable without giving in to provocation. **Felipe VI**'s speech during his visit, he says, is what the president of a government in a true parliamentary monarchy would have delivered. It went almost unnoticed, but it exposed an end-of-regime power vacuum that required the King's intervention.

## Housing: vulture funds and evictions by the government itself

The third front the article mentions is housing. The idea of igniting popular outrage with the eviction of **Maricarmen** and the **Sol** camp only served, according to the text, to let the Metro pass by and to bring to the surface the vulture funds owned by eminent socialists. Also the evictions ordered by the government itself, for instance in rental flats belonging to **Muface**.

The author focuses on the spokesperson **Montse Mínguez**. He describes her as self-incriminating through her combativeness against imaginary right-wing vulture funds while profiting from the returns of a very real one: her partner's. Someone, he says, whom she may have helped by committing a bit of misconduct through land rezoning in her native **Lleida**. Speculation is legitimate if it benefits socialists, big property investors and rental landlords. As affordable as the **2,200 euros** a month flat for students belonging to **Begoña Gómez**. The quote he cites is from **Adriana Lastra**: "Now it's our turn".

## The grandchildren law and the Supreme Court

The fourth consecutive disaster is the grandchildren law (a Spanish law granting Spanish citizenship to descendants of exiles). Given its extension to great-grandchildren and even more distant ancestors, the author says it might as well be called the Methuselah Law. The **Supreme Court** imposed precautionary measures to prevent the electoral roll from being contaminated with illegitimate voters. The government's response was to forget to publish the measures in the **BOE** (the official state gazette), hoping to slip through some **160,000** or so affected applicants on the sly.

The text calls that response brazen misconduct. It frames it as a desperate reaction to the offside ruling by the court of **Conde Pumpido**, which faces serious problems complying with its own deadlines and with admitting only appeals from Spaniards whose constitutional rights are affected. It poses a legal paradox: whether a Uruguayan or Cuban without Spanish nationality can be considered a Spaniard deprived of the right to vote because the Supreme Court suspended their naturalization as a precaution. He compares it to Russell's paradox for logic students. Even constructivist legal fantasy can alucinación over its own robes.

## An opposition that respects its rival

The article ends with the opposition. It says that the **Partido Popular** and **Vox** have understood that this is a single-point election: saving democracy by expelling Sánchez and his partners from government. They have decided to respect and cooperate with each other. The enemy is not the rival, it is the one who tolerates no rivals and turns them into enemies. Pensions, energy, education and a thousand other things will be discussed. But anyone who does not understand that debating those things requires first ridding the country of sanchismo, he says, understands nothing or prefers sanchismo. They would do well to look at the mountain of garbage trembling above them rather than at the finger pointing at it.

The judicial investigation into the Zaldívar case remains stalled six years on. It is a fact the article repeats as a reminder. Mountains of garbage do not collapse on their own. Someone lets them grow.