Aurelio Medel | The Government of Pedro Sánchez, which boasts about the performance of the economy, faces the end of a cycle with failure in what is essential.
Defense: The invasion of Ceuta teaches the lesson that Morocco can take Spain’s North African strongholds without firing a single shot, using only the deployment of people. And on this side of the Strait of Gibraltar, we are still debating how and who designed the operation of July 30. Morocco has the United States and Israel on its side. Who supports Spain?
Education: The conclusion of the latest PISA Report, prepared by the OECD, is that Spanish education has hit rock bottom. A statement that applies as much to El País as it does to ABC. The definitive portrait was painted by CEU professor María Solano in The Conversation: “The data indicates that a 15-year-old student in 2025 reads like a 13-year-old in 2022. Spanish students are a grade and a half behind the British. And the gap with neighboring countries keeps growing. In Spain, we have far fewer top-performing students than the most competitive systems (only 4%), while dragging along far more low-performing, mediocre students (24%).” The problem isn’t AI; it’s human intelligence. Who is going to innovate in a country where young people don’t understand what they read?
Healthcare: The latest Annual Report of the National Health System indicates that across all measurements, it is worse off than before the pandemic. In primary care, half of patients (50.6%) waited more than a day to be seen in 2019; by 2024, that figure reached 70%, and everything points to it having worsened further. In hospitals, the wait time to see a specialist went from 88 days (2019) to 105 (2024), which is almost double that of 2015 (58 days). The wait for non-urgent surgery has increased from 121 days to 126.
Housing: Salary growth bears no correlation with the cost of housing, to the point of becoming unaffordable for an unbearable percentage of young people, whether for purchase or rent. The average salary has risen by 32.6% over the last ten years, from 26,449 euros in 2016 to 35,076 last year. During that same period, the price per square meter of housing across Spain as a whole increased by 47.5%, according to statistics from the Ministry of Housing—a figure that masks vastly different realities across the country. Prices have more than doubled in major cities. Taking the Housing Price Index prepared by the INE as a reference, the conclusion is that the cost of a house has doubled in 12 years, a trend that is especially noticeable in Madrid, the Balearic Islands, Catalonia, and Andalusia—regions that together account for more than half of Spain’s population and job opportunities. How is the birth rate supposed to rise if couples can’t find a nest?
End of a cycle.




