It’s weird because things here are totally cooked in a similar way to the rest of the West, but less so. Enough of the post-war consensus welfare etc has survived that it is still pretty comfortable to be a salaried worker here. Things are getting worse though - grocery prices have gone up a lot in the last few years, and rents have gone absolutely insane by historic standards. This is pretty good for the property-owning class though ofc, not that they have any idea of how good they have it, most of them being convinced that they live in some sort of totalitarian communist dystopia. There’s this other weird thing where the people here all think that Spain is practically the developing world, despite the fact that their infrastructure is some of the best in Europe. It’s very hard to explain to people that, actually, QoL in the UK is actually terrible by comparison.

Wrt party politics, Sanchez is just about clinging on. It seems like this government can’t survive much longer, but he’s defied expectations so many times at this point that you wouldn’t want to bet against him squeaking it again, especially with so much having changed since the last election. He does seem to be pitching some socdem-lite policies on issues like housing too, which is interesting. He’s a neolib and I hate the PSOE with a passion, but Sanchez is the kind of guy who would either nationalize or privatize his own mother if it meant staying in power, so… The right are getting in inevitably though ofc, and they get more and more unhinged with every day that passes. And they basically control the courts, which is what happens when fascists let you have a little democracy as a treat.