If only he could blame it on stupidity (Juan Carlos Girauta in El Debate)

In El Debate, Juan Carlos Girauta argues that El Mundo and La Razón have coordinated two front pages to present Vox as an operation against the PP, repeating a mistake he traces back to 2023. He does not explain it as stupidity: he says he knows Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo and Xavier Albiol and can vouch that this is not the case.

The article by **Juan Carlos Girauta** in **El Debate**, dated **October 26, 2026**, opens with a confession of bewilderment. He cannot understand, nor does he pretend to understand, why two national newspapers have decided to devote their front pages, on the same day, to presenting Vox as an operation aimed against the PP. He considers it a coordinated move and, above all, counterproductive.

## Two front pages and a 2023 mistake

The central thesis is that **El Mundo** and **La Razón** have revived a memory the PP had buried: the mistake of '23, when Vox was presented as an anti-PP operation. On that occasion, the columnist argues, the operation did not exactly benefit those who drove it. Now the same thing is happening again, and on front pages.

Girauta describes the moment as especially ill-timed. The relationship between the PP and Vox, without being a formal alliance, was producing what he calls "spectacular polling expectations" for the only possible alternative to sanchismo. Two spaces that only partially overlap, with different programs, but whose shared priorities are verified in Spain's regional governments. That balance, in his view, is broken by a single front page.

The author does not hide his irritation with the protagonists. He mentions **Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo** and **Xavier Albiol** as **Feijóo**'s two big bets, and asks why they have decided to smash that strategic treasure. He neither knows nor can explain it, he writes, but they have done it in a big way.

## The thesis that Sánchez manufactures Vox's growth

The article devotes a stretch to what he considers the underlying argument of those front pages: that Vox's growth does not come from its own merits, but from a decision by **Sánchez** and the **PSOE**. Girauta takes it to absurdity. If the PSOE were so powerful, he reasons, it would have managed to freeze the main opposition party for three years without it growing at all. And at the same time it would have achieved, regardless of **Abascal**'s ability, a sustained, consistent and robust growth of Vox.

The conclusion he draws is that attributing all this to stupidity would be convenient, but he cannot allow it. He knows both of them, he writes, and can vouch that this is not the case. The sentence that closes the article is a variation of **Jorge Luis Borges**'s famous remark about the Peronists: neither good nor bad, incorrigible.

## The focus that gets diverted

There is an underlying reproach running through the whole text. Girauta argues that the front pages have diverted attention from matters that, in his view, should be the focus: the Barcelona-style spread of what he calls the looting pogre of shops, the situation in **Ceuta**, corruption, the sanchista militias that wrecked Vox events across the country, and what he describes as an attempt by the regime to import into Spain the French model of destruction.

It is not a neutral list. The author presents it as the terrain where the real battle is being fought, and accuses the two newspapers of having looked away just when citizens, he says, are peering into the abyss of a world without civil peace. The choice of timing is no coincidence, in his reading: it comes just as the atmosphere between the PP and Vox was starting to yield electoral fruit.

The piece leaves a question hanging, although the author does not spell it out as such. If the move is coordinated, counterproductive and carried out by people he credits with ability, the incompetence explanation does not work for him. And if it is not incompetence, the suspicion of a deliberate operation remains. Girauta does not develop it. He merely notes that he can find no other reasonable explanation.