A tumultuous year

Look­ing back on the pre­vi­ous twelve months helps us bet­ter un­der­stand the mag­ni­tude of the changes and sur­prises we have wit­nessed (as al­ways, our De­cem­ber issue of­fers you a re­view of the year’s major events). The pan­demic and wars in Ukraine and now be­tween Is­rael and Hamas have marked the last years and months of our lives. 2023 has been far from pre­dictable, con­tin­u­ing to bring dis­rup­tive changes in the way we live and un­der­stand the world. The ef­fects of the pan­demic per­sist, es­pe­cially in our econ­omy and in­dus­try. While fig­ures in­di­cate a rel­a­tive growth in global wealth, the re­al­ity is that cit­i­zens now have much less pur­chas­ing power. The lower en­ergy prices in Spain com­pared to the EU have not suf­fi­ciently com­pen­sated for the in­crease in food prices. Fur­ther­more, the year has left us with a cri­sis it will be dif­fi­cult to re­cover from: a drought that threat­ens to be­come chronic and se­ri­ously af­fect our way of life and econ­omy. It has been a cat­a­strophic year in terms of cli­mate change and water short­age. Re­stric­tions will seem­ingly be much more com­mon and the pri­mary sec­tor will suf­fer in a way that may be in­sur­mount­able for many fam­ily farms, while ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and water scarcity threaten to soon turn part of our coun­try into arid areas, some­thing we are not pre­pared to deal with.

It has been no placid year in po­lit­i­cal terms, ei­ther. Not only be­cause the fragility of the Cata­lan Gov­ern­ment per­sists, but be­cause two elec­tions in Spain have brought about very sig­nif­i­cant changes. On the one hand, the local and re­gional elec­tions that opened the door to coali­tion gov­ern­ments be­tween PP and the far-right VOX. And on the other, gen­eral elec­tions in which a PP vic­tory was in­suf­fi­cient to se­cure the gov­ern­ment, open­ing the door to the pre­vi­ously unimag­in­able PSOE agree­ment with Junts. As a re­sult, Span­ish pol­i­tics is in con­stant tur­moil. By way of ex­am­ple, the amnesty law, until re­cently re­jected by the PSOE, will be ap­proved in the com­ing weeks and may take ef­fect in the first quar­ter of 2024... so hold on tight, the be­gin­ning of next year may well be as tu­mul­tuous as this year has been.