The direction of the wind

Gaza mobilizes but doesn't win elections. The Italian region of Marche tells us something about this. Marche, with just over 100,000 inhabitants, capital Ancona, a former border territory of the Papal States, with the lordship of Urbino at its forefront, had been part of the red constellation of central Italy, more communalist than communist. Several long-established companies went into crisis a few years ago, and Giorgia Meloni 's party won. It was the first region conquered by the Brothers of Italy. Last Sunday, the Democratic Party tried to recapture Marche under the Palestinian flag and failed. But immediately after, things happened...

After learning of the Israeli attack on the flotilla, which was carrying some 40 Italian citizens, there were massive demonstrations not seen for years. Francesco Olivo reported this well in La Vanguardia . Meloni was furious. He misjudged the protest and called them "daddy's boys." Meloni is a true politician, but at the same time, she is very sensitive. Her true family was the party she joined at 15, the MSI.

Gaza has formed a current of hot air favorable to the PSOE, but that air will not always blow.

Gaza won't win the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) the general election, but it has allowed the Socialists to start the year by taking the initiative. Pedro Sánchez 's cabinet worked throughout the month of August. The PSOE was on the verge of collapse during the extraordinary sequence of events that occurred between the scandalous power outage at the end of April and the scandalous appearance of the Cerdán crater at the end of June. There were seismic upheavals in some large companies, some investigations were accelerated, and even the president of the Spanish episcopate, Luis Argüello , believed the time had come to call for early elections. In August, a Catholic organization in Madrid asked Salvador Illa to hold a public meeting with Argüello in September to calm the waters. Illa accepted. Politics often swings in the direction of the pendulum, and life undulates, as Josep Pla so often repeated.

The PSOE-Sumar coalition was on the verge of being knocked out, and in September, the PSOE's hot-air balloon was pushed upward by a current of hot air from the Eastern Mediterranean. The opening scene of Jules Verne 's great novel, * The Mysterious Island *, can serve as inspiration. In July, they were about to throw everything overboard to gain altitude. Sánchez, in the role of the imperturbable engineer Ciro Smith , called for calm. Suddenly, a column of hot air has formed that could carry the government to a habitable island with fresh water and supplies to last until 2027. Yolanda Díaz is perilously hanging from the balloon's basket, and Ione Belarra is clinging tightly to her ankles, with intentions that Verne would hardly describe as friendly. Some polls say the island is already in sight.

The PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) is reportedly recovering some of the electorate it lost during the summer. It's not rocketing upwards. It's regrouping. The tragedy in Gaza is mobilizing women a great deal for reasons that aren't difficult to understand. Women have a better immune system against nihilism.

The winds of the times are blowing against human piety. The new American leaders have sought to justify it with Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Love of neighbor should be organized in concentric circles: first I take care of my own, and then I'll see if I have time for others. The Ordo Amoris (the order of love) was the subject of a great theological polemic last winter. Pope Francis and the American Cardinal Robert F. Prevost countered that love of neighbor must have a universal dimension. Catholicism is universality. Francis and Leo XIV seem to be winning the argument in southern Europe. The upheaval has finally pierced the thick layers of indifference.

We are in a Catholic moment , as happened in 2003 with Iraq. The European middle classes interpreted Bush 's wars as a grave threat to the tranquility acquired after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The brave new world of Barcelona 92 ​​could collapse. And it did.

We are living another 'Catholic moment', like the one that occurred in 2003 during the Iraq war.

The Gaza massacre conveys a more sinister message: tranquility no longer exists, and we are inaugurating a world in which those who cause trouble can be liquidated, physically or civilly, outside the law, in the Middle East as well as in Chicago and New York. One day you disappear and end up in the gulag of El Salvador. “The enemy is within,” Donald Trump and his Secretary of State have just declared.

Many young people have begun to pick up on the background radiation. Some will vote for the far right to take revenge on feminism, while others are suspecting what the new game is. They want Gaza to be a futuristic rehearsal: ruins, cheap labor, beaches and high technology, a free zone run by an imperial consulate. A new morphology of the world is emerging, based on special enclaves, gulags, and powerful metropolitan areas increasingly disconnected from their respective national frameworks.

Read also

Gaza won't win elections in Spain, but there's a buzz in the air. Barcelona, ​​Madrid, and other cities experienced a Catholic moment yesterday—someone will be irritated reading this, but I believe it is. In Barcelona, ​​many families with their children, all shades of the left and Catalanists who haven't forgotten the Christian Democrat substance of Jordi Pujol . Social Catholics, hard-line leftists, and young second-generation North Africans searching for their place in the city. This mixture is also a response to the Catalan Alliance.

The Popular Party failed to understand the Catholic moment of 2003 and paid for it in 2004. Now harassed by the growth of Vox—the hypothesis of a 20% vote for Vox is credible— Alberto Núñez Feijóo is only hoping that the column of hot air will soon dissipate and that the PSOE succumbs on the judicial front. The Attorney General of the State will be tried very soon. Begoña Gómez will be tried, twice. The top brass of the former Ministry of the Interior, headed by Jorge Fernández Díaz , will be tried in the Kitchen case. José Luís Ábalos will most likely be tried, and we'll see what happens with Santos Cerdán . In Madrid, there are novenas to the UCO. Judge Manuel Marchena watches the scene impassively.

Gaza won't decide the elections, but it has changed the direction of the wind.