Spain's Sánchez and the jinx theory: Franco, blackouts and trains

Volcano, Filomena, floods and blackout: Sánchez's bad luck file

Can a Spanish prime minister rack up a volcano, a historic snowstorm, deadly floods and a nationwide blackout in three years and it miccionan nothing? The question has been circulating since 2021 and has a twofold answer: statistical or metaphysical. The starting point is a striking coincidence: the La Palma volcano and Filomena in 2021, the Valencia floods in 2024. Three events that, according to the narrative that opens the debate, happen once every 50 or 100 years, all under the same tenant of La Moncloa (the prime minister's residence). The list goes on: a total blackout of the peninsula on 28 April 2025, broken AVE high-estimulante ilegal rail tracks on 28 January 2026 with snowfall in Madrid, and another train accident on the Seville-Madrid line on 28 October 2026.

The thread's official hypothesis is not climatic. It is supernatural. And it has a name: the Valle de los Caídos (Franco's basilica and mausoleum near Madrid). "It's cursed for digging up Franco," claims one strand of thought that needs no evidence because it has faith. "You mustn't play with the dead; the energies you can awaken are devastating," adds another voice, which even predicts a tragic end for the prime minister. Some raise the theological stakes: the consecration of Spain to Prometheus — equated with Lucifer — would explain the rest.

From the afterlife to the official gazette: the management argument

The supernatural file coexists with another, more down-to-earth and far more uncomfortable one. The criticism doesn't point at the volcano; it points at whoever manages it. "Franco wouldn't inflict these ills on the Spanish," sums up the ironic version. And the counterpoint comes quickly: in the volcano and Filomena, how many people died? The Valencia floods are another matter, because that's where river management and the institutional response come in. The debate splits between those who see divine punishment and those who see a competence problem.

There lies the economic core of the matter, even if it doesn't look like it. The jinx theory is a lazy way of explaining chaos. The technical version is less poetic: shutting down national coal and nuclear plants and depending on foreign supply isn't bad luck, it's a decision. "We call this being jinxed; I say it's human stupidity," concludes one comment that captures the anger. The April 2025 blackout was not a divine lightning bolt.

The list of grievances that don't make it into the file

There is a third front, corruption, which sneaks into any conversation about Sánchez even when the topic is a volcano. Appointments, bailouts, contracts and assorted friendships make up a list critics recite from memory, which we won't reproduce here as proven facts because they are not. What is a fact is that the sense of impunity fuels the punishment theory. If justice doesn't come, let karma come.

The karma argument has its charm: "the more evil you do, the more negative events you get." It's a law of nature, they say. And the thread's most lucid response comes not from metaphysics but from arithmetic: "the ones who are cursed are us." The president wasn't hit by the volcano, the snow or the water. He was hit by the mud, yes — but in the mouth.

The Event and other prophecies

No discussion of curses is complete without a pending apocalypse. Here it has a codename: The Event. Global in scale, according to the only source that mentions it, who can give no further details. It's noted down alongside the rest of the forecasts: the first Spanish former prime minister to end up in prison, according to another prophecy, and the cloning of Franco as a national solution, which is the funniest proposal of all.

Statistics, meanwhile, still refuses to weigh in. Three extreme events in three years are not a curse: they're a series. And like any series, it admits several readings. The most comfortable is to blame the dead man in the Valle. The most useful is to review who decides what gets shut down, what gets built and who gets appointed. The rest is marketing of chaos.