Sánchez and the jinx narrative: from housing to pensions

From the "political animal" to the 10 billion euro loan for pensions

The sequence repeats itself with a punctuality that is starting to look like a method. An event the Government can present as a banner —Paquita's eviction, the housing protest camp, the interview with Broncano and its audience figures— and a coalition of commentators declaring the contest won. Then, the correction. This time the trigger was a phrase: that immigration does not bring crime, "quite the opposite." The next day, the riots and looting in central Barcelona dominated the footage.

The jinx thesis has its charm and its trap. One diagnosis of the material sums it up without mincing words: it is not bad luck, it is "spending the infrastructure money on whores and coke, and then those structures end up deadly." Luck, the argument goes, does not explain a record of governance. And there the article stops: the accusation remains just that, an opinion thrown into the air, with no evidence to back it up.

The 10 billion euro loan that dismantles the campaign's central theme

The second front is more tangible. With housing defenestrated as a banner, the campaign team was looking for another axis and found it in pensions. The problem arrived via the BOE (Spain's official state gazette): the approval of a State loan to the General Treasury of the Social Security system for 10 billion euros to pay November's paychecks and the Christmas extra before the holidays. The question it raises is textbook: why, month after month, does money from outside the system have to be used to pay pensions?

It is no minor detail. It turns a campaign talking point into an uncomfortable question any rival can repeat from a podium. And the electoral calendar of November 29, with antiestéticar within the party itself that street violence attributed to the far left will benefit the "law and order" parties, completes the picture.

Barcelona: who looted, and why the video does not settle the debate

On the riots, the material offers two readings that do not fit together. One holds that the close-up footage shows those responsible and that the protagonists filmed themselves. The other warns that among the assailants there are "many white people" and "girls, in significant numbers," and asks who organized the call on social media. Neither closes the matter; the second, at least, introduces a reasonable doubt about the oversimplification.

The baraka of the Little Lower General

There is one theory worth mentioning for its anthropological value. Luck, the baraka, was said to cling to the remains of the Little Lower General (a nickname for Franco), buried under a thick slab so it would not escape. When the remains were removed, the country lost its amulet. It is an explanation as good as any other and, certainly, more entertaining than an AIReF report.

The analysis gets stuck right here: on whether the problem is adverse fortune or the management that causes it. The loan figures point to the latter. The riots, to a narrative that breaks before it can be fixed.