Europe’s Reckoning: Dare More Democracy, or Watch the Reactionaries Win

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Monday 23rd March 2026

In the tapas bars of Madrid and the windswept plains of Extremadura, a quiet capitulation is underway. Spain’s Popular Party, once a stolid bastion of post-Franco conservatism, now finds itself propped up by Vox coalitions in region after region. Vox, the outfit that once lurked on the fringes, has doubled its seats in recent ballots and is scooping up nearly 40 per cent of young Spanish men,  not because they are all frothing ideologues, but because housing is a joke, wages have stagnated and the cost of living bites harder than any Brussels directive. 

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, Sunday 22nd March 2026

My brothers and sisters of every nation, tribe, and tongue, hear me now, not as a distant echo from Galilee, but as the living Word who still walks among the wounded and weeps with every mother who buries her child beneath the rubble of pride.

You only like it when I curse! Off feck!

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, 21st March 2026.

In the drizzle of a Paris evening, where the lamps along the Seine flicker like guilty secrets, a man may still feel the old thrill of espionage. Not the sort that involves microfilm or beautiful women in railway carriages, though God knows there are enough of both, but the quieter intrigue of the dog. I had come to the capital to write a harmless travel piece; instead, I found myself tailing a creature that looked as if it had escaped from a medieval bestiary and was now plotting to annex the Left Bank. Its owner, a woman in Hermès and despair, called it “Mon Petit Assassin.” I called it Tuesday.

(or, A Trifle in Three Acts, with Greyhounds and Killer Dogs)

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid, 21st March 2026.

In the drizzle of a Paris evening, where the lamps along the Seine flicker like guilty secrets, a man may still feel the old thrill of espionage. Not the sort that involves microfilm or beautiful women in railway carriages, though God knows there are enough of both, but the quieter intrigue of the dog. I had come to the capital to write a harmless travel piece; instead, I found myself tailing a creature that looked as if it had escaped from a medieval bestiary and was now plotting to annex the Left Bank. Its owner, a woman in Hermès and despair, called it “Mon Petit Assassin.” I called it Tuesday.