The Sobremesa Podcast

Far-right Vox looks likely to be the major beneficiary of Spain’s November general election, having jumped from 12.4 percent of the vote in 2023 to 19 percent last week in polling from El País. In recent months, the far-right party has continued to gain ground against a backdrop that, until the housing protests, had been dominated by the fallout from the mass influx of migrants to Ceuta this summer. The dramatic images, from late July, of an estimated 72,000 people streaming in from Morocco to Spain’s north African exclave were immediately seized upon by Vox, and its media allies, as they imposed a narrative of invasion and national betrayal across the broader right-wing bloc.

This week we discuss Vox’s electoral strategy before a poll which could see the far-right enter government in coalition with the conservative right Partido Popular for the first time since Spain’s transition to democracy. To do so I am joined by political analyst Connor Mulhern, who works on The Reactionary International research project: https://act.progressive.international/reactionary

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Less than two weeks after a wave of housing protests broke out across Spain, centre-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez called an early general election on Mondayyesterday. Upending the country’s political agenda in just days, the protests created an opportunity for an embattled Sánchez to go to the polls on more favorable terms. He is now framing the election as a choice between his defense of the social majority and right-wing parties aligned with speculators and vulture funds.

Today on Sobremesa podcast we discuss the events of the last week, including the tragic death of Maricarmen on Wednesday, and look ahead to the election campaign with Professor Joe Haslam. As always if you like what we are producing, please considering supporting us on our buy me a coffee page.

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On Wednesday September 23, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from the Madrid flat where she had lived for more than 70 years. The vulture fund that owned the property had raised her monthly rent from €500 to €2,650. Removed on a stretcher and taken to hospital, Maricarmen became the focus of widespread anger over Spain’s housing crisis - where rents have increased 87 percent over the last decade. 

Thousands protested in Madrid that evening, with demonstrations spreading elsewhere in Spain, followed by a far larger march last Saturday of up to 300,000 people. In the immediate aftermath of that march a massive protest camp was step up in Madrid's iconic Puerta del Sol square - in a move that echoed the Indignados occupations 15 years earlier. For five nights in a row now, thousands of people have packed Sol demanding an end to speculation and soaring rental prices.

Today on Sobremesa Podcast, we talk to Hannah Fakir, an activist with the Sindicato de Inquilinas Madrid’s tenants union - who organized the non-violent resistance to Maricarmen’s eviction and are behind the protest camp. I talked to her in Sol as protestors chanted in the background. As always if you like what we are producing and want to keep the podcast sustainable, please consider donating to our buy me a coffee page.

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In the first episode of our new series on the Spanish Transition, Alan McGuire speaks to historian Alejandro Quiroga, Senior Lecturer of History at Complutense University of Madrid, about the political economy of Spain’s passage from dictatorship to democracy.

How did a movement for democratic change that started on the streets become a process negotiated between political parties and political elites?

We also dispel the myth that it was a peaceful transition. We discuss far-right terrorism, political violence and the possibility that the military could intervene and halt the progress towards democracy.

Finally, we discuss one of the most important and controversial moments of the Transition: the legalization of the Communist Party in 1977, and what its legalisation tells us about the compromises and powers that shaped the emerging democratic system.

If you enjoy The Sobremesa Podcast, you can help keep the podcast going through our Buy Me a Coffee fund. Donations help us improve the sound, and pay for the programs to run the podcast.

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As the ongoing fallout from the Ceuta border surge continues to dominate Spanish headlines, we examine the government's management of crisis and how it dropped the ball after its initial success in containing the influx.

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As between 70 and 80,000 people streamed into Spain’s small North African exclave of Ceuta two weeks ago, the global far-right mobilized to foment moral panic - weaponising the dramatic scenes of the predominantly younger Moroccans swimming into Spanish territory to spread a narrative of Europe’s invasion.

This misinformation campaign continued even as Spanish authorities swiftly acted to return the vast majority of arrivals within a 24 hour period. 15 days later debate still rages about what exactly took place on Moroccan/Ceuta border, who or what triggered the border surge and what was the precise role of the Moroccan state in the chaos?

To discuss the crisis, as well as wider Spanish foreign policy, I am joined by Spanish MP Txema Guijarro, who is the secretary general of the Sumar parliamentary group and sits on the Spanish parliament’s defence committee.

As always if you like what we are producing please consider leaving us a donation at our Buy Me a Coffee Page.

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2026 marks the centenary of Ernest Hemingway’s novel ‘The Sun also Rises’, which brought Pamplona’s San Fermín festival international fame.

Yet beyond its place in Hemingway’s iconic novel and the yearly international news reports of tourists injured or even dying in the running of the bulls, the fiestas of San Fermín has also served as a symbolic battleground in Navarre's unresolved identity conflict. As the capital of Navarre, Pamplona sits at the intersection of two competing national projects: Basque nationalists regard the region as an inseparable part of the historic Basque homeland, while Navarrese regionalists and Spanish unionists insist on Navarre's distinct political identity and institutions. Every July, those rival visions spill into the festival through disputes over flags, language, official ceremonies and the public symbolism of the encierro.

Today on Sobremesa Podcast we look to go beyond the cliches and instagram posts generated around Sanfermin and look at its deeper cultural, historical and political significance. To do so, I am joined once again by Tulane University’s Brittany Kennedy - an expert in Basque culture.

If you like what we are producing and want to keep the podcast sustainable, please consider donating to our buy me a coffee page. The link is the show notes. Okay, I hope you enjoy my interview with Brittany.

In recent months Pedro Sánchez's government has faced the most sustained judicial offensive of its time in office. Sanchez’s wife has been ordered to stand trial for influence peddling and her passport confiscated because a right-wing judge believed she constituted a flight risk. Meanwhile the prime minister’s brother is now awaiting a verdict in a highly controversial trial for influence peddling and malfeasance that was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. At the same time, Former Socialist prime minister and key Sanchez ally, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has also been placed under criminal investigation - after the US Homeland Security Department supplied messages from a cloned phone that suggests he could have lobbied for a pandemic-era loan for a Venezuelan airline. 

Lawfare has been a key weapon for the Spanish right in undermining Sanchez’s left-leaning administration over the last 8 years - with its use accelerating particularly after the 2023 Catalan amnesty. But the intervention of the Trump administration adds a new international dimension - with many in the Spanish media and politics believing that the questionable evidence sent by US Homeland Security against Zatatero in March was retaliation for Sanchez’s stance on the war in Iran. It was a move which has certainly killed most of Sanchez’s momentum from his growing international profile and plunged his administration into renewed crisis.

Today on Sobremesa podcast, we discuss the judicial siege that Sanchez, his government and family now find themselves under. And to do so I am joined by IE University’s Joe Haslam.

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Let me tell you a story about Lavapiés. Spain's housing crisis has finally come for you. Your home has just been sold to a vulture fund and they want you out. What would you do? The residents at Calle Tribulete 7 came together and set out on a path of resistance, one that would transform them into a Madrid-wide symbol of the battle for housing rights. The documentary Soy Tribulete 7 (I am Tribulete 7) takes us inside the 107-year-old Lavapiés building and into the lives of an extraordinary community whose looming eviction launched the fight of their lives.

This week on Sobremesa podcast, we discuss the new documentary and the housing block behind. To do so, I am joined by the film’s co-director Leah Pattem. Leah is a photo and investigative journsalist and the founder of the blog Madrid No Frills.

Remember if you like what we are producing and want to keep the podcast sustainable going forward, please consider making a donation to our Buy me a Coffee page: https://buymeacoffee.com/thesobremeyTrailer for the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wr1hdNO51I

Last month Madrid’s right wing regional premier Isabel Ayuso took it upon herself to travel to Mexico so as to lecture the Mexican public about their own history - as she participated in a homage to the conquistador Hernan Cortes. Proving once again her reputation as a Trumpian figure within the mainstream conservative Popular Party, she even went as far as to insist on her return to Madrid that “Mexico did not exist until the Spanish arrived.” 

She and much of Spanish right have form on this. In 2021 as Pope Francis apologised for the Catholic Church’s role in the conquest of the Americas, she responded: “It surprises me that a Spanish-speaking Catholic would speak that way about a legacy like ours, which was precisely to bring Spanish—and, through the missions, Catholicism, and thus civilization and freedom—to the American continent,”

Today on Sobremesa podcast we talk about Spain’s other memory war, that is: The Spanish right’s revisionist crusade to revindicate the supposed civilizational mission associated with the conquest of the Americas. To do so I am joined by the historian Juan José Ponce Vázquez, of The University of Alabama.

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