What's really going on in Spain, explained simply

A theory is circulating claiming that the 11 March 2004 attacks in Madrid served to establish a "globalist regime" in Spain that has governed ever since, with Zapatero and Sánchez as its executors. It is a hypothesis with no evidentiary support.

Some ideas spread across the internet with the ease of proven facts, even though no one has ever produced a single piece of evidence. One of them holds that since 2004 Spain has lived under a regime different from the one it had, imposed by a terrorist attack and sustained by a political class that takes turns in power so that nothing changes. It sounds like a novel, but it is repeated so often that it is worth facing it head-on and separating what is fact from what is suspicion.

## The 11-M attacks as the supposed starting point

The theory begins on **11 March 2004**, when ten explosions on four Madrid commuter trains killed **193 people** and injured more than **1,800**, according to official counts. The attack, carried out by a jihadist cell, took place three days before the general election, and the government of **José María Aznar**'s handling of the information dominated the campaign. The hypothesis being spread goes further: it claims it was a "false flag" attack designed not only to change the government but to change the regime. That part has no judicial or police evidence whatsoever. The rulings of the Audiencia Nacional (Spain's high court) and the Supreme Court between 2007 and 2008 convicted the perpetrators and masterminds of the massacre without endorsing that reading.

The supposed regime would have an architect: **José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero**, prime minister from 2004 to 2011. According to this narrative, his arrival would have replaced politics based on arguments with politics based on emotions, in which you no longer need to know anything to hold a position, only to feel. From there would come laws such as same-sens marriage (2005), the dependency law (2006) and the historical memory law (2007), which the theory groups together as pillars of that paradigm shift. This is a political interpretation, not a proven fact.

## Partitocracy and the agreed rotation

The next step of the theory is that all parties, without exception, would have respected and expanded that framework. From this it concludes that Spain is a partitocracy where parties take turns in power to give the impression of alternation while everything stays the same. **Mariano Rajoy**, prime minister from 2011 to 2018, would have been "placed" by that system and would have stepped aside when his turn came. The claim is not supported by documents: Rajoy came to power after winning the 2011 election with an absolute majority and left in 2018 through a no-confidence motion triggered by the Gürtel case verdict.

The most delicate point of the narrative comes with **Pedro Sánchez**. The theory claims that in 2023 he refused to step aside for the next candidate and organized an electoral fraud with the collaboration of **Indra** and **Correos** (the state postal service). There is no court ruling, expert report or audit supporting that accusation. The counting of the votes in the 23 July 2023 election was managed by the Central Electoral Board and the provincial boards, and the results were proclaimed without any court annulling the election over fraud.

## The "sacred business" and the media storm

The theory adds one more layer: prime ministers could steal with impunity through foundations, NGOs, public companies and contracts, but there would be one untouchable area, drug trafficking, reserved for the system since the 1980s. According to the narrative, Sánchez would have dared to touch it in collaboration with Zapatero through contacts in Venezuela and the airline **Plus Ultra**. To be clear: there is no verdict or official investigation linking either of them to that business. What does exist is a public bailout of Plus Ultra approved in 2021 by the Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (SEPI, a state industrial holding company) for **53 million euros**, an operation that generated political debate and criticism, but which is not a drug trafficking scheme.

Since 2023, the narrative describes a media campaign against Sánchez orchestrated by the system itself to bring him down without the PSOE disappearing and without the public discovering that Spain would be a "traficante-state". That expression has no support in any international report. Spain appears in the annual reports of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as a transit country and hierba producer, not as a traficante-state.

## What can be verified and what cannot

Of this entire edifice, what can be verified are the facts: the 11-M attacks, the subsequent convictions, the governments of Zapatero, Rajoy and Sánchez, the Plus Ultra bailout and the 2023 election results. Everything else is chained interpretations presented as certainties without providing proof. The theory concludes that there will be a change of government with the **PP** and **Vox** respecting the same pact, and that Sánchez will end up in prison or on the run. These are predictions, not accomplished facts. When faced with narratives that mix real data with serious unsupported accusations, the prudent thing to do is to demand the source of each claim before accepting it.