Democrats woke up Wednesday after a 12-month nightmare with the feeling that their inability to connect with their voters and win elections like the one they lost exactly a year ago against Republican President Donald Trump was nothing but a bad dream.

Faith in the party’s chances of victory returned with resounding wins in New York — where the socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in the most anticipated contest of the night — as well as in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia (which Abigail Spanberger turned blue) and New Jersey (which Mikie Sherrill won). In both states, the centrist candidates swept their Republican opponents. The Democrats, moreover, won almost everything where they ran: from the Detroit mayoral race to the vote to stop Somerville, Massachusetts, from investing in Israel.

The dose of good news — and the adrenaline rush after a year of post-mortem examinations of the November 2024 defeat — was completed by Californians voting “yes” on Proposition 50, which put to a referendum the efforts of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw voting districts in California. Newsom managed to convince his fellow citizens that only with tactics like this is it possible to defeat Trump, who is pushing to alter electoral maps across the country to favor his supporters in the 2026 midterm elections.

The effect of that vote goes beyond the confines of the most populous territory in the country, because it secures for the Democrats five seats up for grabs in next year’s midterms, in which Republicans risk losing control of one or both Houses of Congress.

Left turn?

The California result arrived around midnight due to the time difference. By then, it was clear what had happened, although there was no consensus on how. The party, which celebrated its victories as a referendum on Trump’s second administration — which is relentlessly advancing down its authoritarian path 10 months after he took office — remains divided on the best way to continue winning. Is Mamdani’s progressivism and shift to the left the key? Or could his phenomenal campaign — from which there is much to learn about how to seduce the electorate in record time and activate young people — never have ended so well in the purple states, a color that comes from mixing Democratic blue and Republican red?

These questions meant that each faction of the party had something to celebrate Wednesday, and, equally, that the victory did not illuminate a single path toward the 2028 presidential elections. “The important thing,” Democratic Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez of New York explains to EL PAÍS, “is that we have sent a signal to the Republicans: there is an erosion of public support for the president, whose approval rating is at rock bottom.” “These elections have made it clear what battles we must fight and what positions we must adopt to win. It’s not about moderates or progressives, but about listening to the voters and fighting again for the working class,” adds Velázquez, who is on the left side of the coalition.

Both Spanberger and Sherrill presented themselves as moderate candidates, and both won by a landslide with over 56% of the vote. Their life stories further reinforced this moderate image. The new governor of Virginia was a CIA agent. The governor of New Jersey was a Navy helicopter pilot. They also share the fact that they entered politics in opposition to Trump and successfully positioned themselves as an alternative to the policies of the Republican president.

Mamdani, for his part, tried to focus on municipal issues such as rent freezes and free buses for New Yorkers, although with Trump in power, everything is inevitably overshadowed by the national circus, with him as its sole ringmaster. The young and proud socialist’s emphasis on affordability in a city ravaged by financial issues, where residents struggle to make ends meet, has proven to be a successful strategy that can be replicated elsewhere. It also stands in stark contrast to the campaign that led Kamala Harris to lose in every key state last year to Trump, whose candidacy successfully convinced voters that only Republicans cared about the cost of living and rampant inflation.

On Tuesday, when the debacle was already apparent, the U.S. president rushed to distance himself from the runners in his party with an all-caps message that once again revealed him as a team player only when the team wins. He wrote: “Trump wasn’t on the ballot, and shutdown [which on Tuesday shattered its all-time record with no end in sight] were the two reasons that Republicans lost elections tonight, according to pollsters.” On Wednesday, he addressed a group of conservative senators at a breakfast at the White House, asking them to examine their consciences, as if the matter had nothing to do with him.

Despite the blatant disclaimer of responsibility, Trump has a point: the results in Virginia — which until Tuesday had a Republican governor and is home to some 150,000 federal workers — indicate that voters blame the president’s party for cutting off public funding. They also show that the Democrats’ risky decision not to vote with their rivals to reopen the government until they receive guarantees that there will be no cuts to healthcare subsidies is proving to be a winning move in the arena of public opinion, despite the harm being done to federal employees who have stopped receiving their paychecks. Many have been forced to rely on food banks to fill their pantries.

Sherrill’s victory in New Jersey, meanwhile, hides hopeful signs for the party, which has seen the return to the fold of some of the Hispanic and African American minority voters who fled in the 2024 presidential elections.

The respite that Tuesday’s elections have given Democrats has not, however, resolved the major outstanding issue: who will lead the party back to the White House? Mamdani cannot run for president because he was born in Uganda and the law prohibits him from doing so. Harris, who has just published a memoir in which she blames everyone but herself for her defeat, has not ruled out the idea. And among the names that have been solidified in the predictions for months, from progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, none clearly stands out.

Newsom, who emerged strengthened from the Proposition 50 referendum as someone unafraid to take shortcuts to achieve results, is another prospect. On Tuesday, he strove to make his victory appearance what history may ultimately remember as the first speech of his presidential campaign.

“Tonight was not just a victory for the Democratic Party. It was a victory for the United States of America, for the people of this country and the principles that our founding fathers lived and died for,” Newsom said.

Now it remains to be seen how far this momentum will take the Democrats, and how they plan to regain their momentum after a year in limbo. In a country perpetually in election mode, the campaign for the 2026 midterm elections, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be renewed, is officially underway a year before they take place.

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Nikolai Gogol was Ukrainian and also one of the most prominent names in Russian literature. A source of pride for Russian cultural identity, Gogol wrote one of his most celebrated collections of short stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, in 1831 from the imperial capital, St. Petersburg. The text features fantastical characters from this rural region of Poltava province in eastern Ukraine. The writer explored the forces of good and evil in the folklore of his homeland — demons that descended from the sky to torment humans, much like the Russian bomb that fell in the region on October 20.

The news caused a stir in the province, far removed from the front lines. Long-range drones and missiles are commonplace in Poltava, but not an aerial bomb. Guided aerial bombs (KABs, in their Ukrainian acronym) are weapons that Russian fighter-bombers release at high altitudes and that glide to their target. Until now, KABs had a range of no more than 50 kilometers (31 miles), focusing in the first phase of the war (2022-2023) on targeting the Ukrainian front line and, later (from 2024 onward), the logistical centers in the immediate rear.

With technological improvements, KABs were able to cover 70 to 90 kilometers (43-56 miles), but the bomb that fell in the Dikanka region traveled more than 100 kilometers (62 miles), according to estimates by the Ukrainian army. This was not an isolated incident: in October, several similar KAB attacks were reported for the first time: in Lozova, Kharkiv province, the bomb traveled 130 kilometers (80 miles); in Odesa province, in the south, 100 kilometers. Mykolaiv, also in the south, and Dnipro and Krivi Rih, in the east, were other targets far from the fighting that KABs reached for the first time.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence services (GUR) reported on October 20 that the enemy had begun mass production of the new UMPK modules, systems that are incorporated into the Grom-1 and Grom-2 bombs, enabling them to travel 200 kilometers (125 miles). The KAB technology transforms a conventional bomb by adding wings, a small jet engine, and a guidance system.

Increasing the range of this weaponry keeps Russian aircraft in a safer operational zone relative to Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles. And economically, it’s a clear advantage, according to the Ukrainian defense analysis website Militarnyi, because the Russian arsenal of air-launched bombs is much larger than its missile arsenal, and the cost is much lower: while producing a KAB with the UMPK system can cost $250,000, a cruise missile costs up to $1 million.

Russia’s use of guided aerial bombs has increased exponentially, according to a tally released on October 19 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy: in one week in October, Russian aircraft fired 1,370 KAB bombs. The monthly average in 2024 was between 200 and 300.

“The Russians have struck gold” with the long-range KABs, claimed an article in the Ukrainian newspaper Strana on October 24: “They carry two or three times more explosive than Shahed drones, fly at higher speeds, maneuver less predictably thanks to the UMPK, and are smaller than a missile, making them harder to shoot down.”

“The KAB with the long-range UMPK module is a huge headache for air defenses,” another portal specializing in military analysis, The War Zone, emphasized on October 23. “They are extremely difficult to shoot down because they are small, relatively fast [flying at a speed of between 250 and 310 miles per hour] and do not leave a thermal signature.”

On October 29, a military vehicle parked outside a grocery store in Miloradove, a village near Dikanka. Inside, a sergeant-major named Vadim was about to do some shopping. This soldier confirmed that a KAB had fallen in the region but didn’t know the exact location. According to official army reports, the bomb was probably aimed at the city of Poltava, 12 miles further south, but missed its target. “It’s a big problem because there’s no way to intercept KABs,” Vadim stated. In the attack on the Odesa region, the Ukrainian Air Force claimed to have shot one down. “I don’t know, I’ve never seen our anti-aircraft guns have time to intercept them,” the sergeant-major added.

Fear in Kyiv

The main drawback of these bombs is their low accuracy, which means that, when fired at targets in urban areas, they can cause serious harm to the civilian population, as Zelenskiy has stated. The Ukrainian authorities fear that these new Russian bombs could reach Kyiv. The capital is located about 125 miles from the Russian border.

“The front has remained largely unchanged for a long time, and Vladimir Putin wants to win at any cost, and one way to do so is by intensifying terror among the population,” says Oleksi Melnik, co-director of the Razumkov Center for Political and Defense Studies. “By destroying energy infrastructure and carrying out long-range bombing, the Russians intend to destabilize Ukrainian society.”

Serhii is a young ex-soldier, discharged during the war because his brother died in combat and, as an only child, he is entitled to leave the service. Today, Serhii runs a mechanic’s workshop in Poltava, the region EL PAÍS visited, and recounts his experience with KABs. “In war, new weapons always appear, and then new ways to counter them; the same will happen with these bombs,” he says.

With a wrench in his hand, Serhii gives EL PAÍS directions to find the exact spot where the bomb fell. On a forest trail, a shepherdess leading a stray cow offers further directions, and further on, an elderly woman on a bicycle guides the journalist to a cluster of farms where she supposedly heard a metallic clang. Each character encountered along the way could inspire another Gogol story, narratives in which it’s difficult to distinguish reality from dream. What is certain is that the Poltava KAB existed: its remains are currently being analyzed in Kyiv, at the Institute of Armament and Military Technology of the Armed Forces.

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Drug traffickers are giving police no respite in Galicia. Although cocaine seizures haven’t yet reached the levels of 20 years ago, when they hit record highs, this Spanish northwestern region facing the Atlantic Ocean is experiencing a surge in shipments: 11.5 tons worth €800 million ($918 million) have been seized so far in 2025, compared with 10.5 tons in all of 2024. This surge has been compounded by the arrival of more narco-submarines, intercepted thanks to effective collaboration between international anti-drug agencies. In this relentless battle against drug traffickers, this exchange of information prioritizes stemming the flow of shipments across the Atlantic.

With two months left in the year — and with the expectation that increased consumption during the Christmas season will further boost drug shipments — the rate of seizures has risen to an average of almost a ton of cocaine per month, both at sea and on land or in commercial ports such as the one in the city of Vigo. The Vigo container terminal has become a major headache and a constant source of concern for the officers responsible for monitoring goods and detecting drugs that are concealed within tons of legal products shipped primarily from Latin America.

With narco-submarines as the most undetectable means of transportation, every drug trafficker’s venture now has a greater chance of success. The arrival of these crudely constructed vessels in Europe coincides with a cocaine production boom in Colombia, the main supplier, and the number of seizures represents a tiny fraction of the total shipments estimated to be circulating in the ocean, according to the police. Two of these narco-boats reached the Galician coast in 2025, and evidence suggests that many of the shipments seized at sea or on land have been sent in these vessels, which are then sunk without leaving any trace of their voyage.

“We are seeing a lot of narco-submarine activity because it is the most profitable system for the organizations. The investment is lower and the chances of the drugs reaching their destination are higher, which is why the battle is constant,” states Emilio Rodríguez Ramos, head of the GRECO organized crime response unit of the Spanish National Police in Pontevedra. In this globalized process of drug trafficking, the inspector highlights international cooperation through liaison agencies as a key advance, in which the detection of ships by the U.S. and the U.K. is proving fundamental. However, technological resources are still insufficient. “We need much more technology to access encrypted systems, and that also requires the involvement of every country,” adds Rodríguez.

The first submersible carrying cocaine was seized in November 2019. Police recovered the vessel with three tons of cocaine on board and arrested its three crew members. Since then, three more have been intercepted, although it is believed that many more may remain at the bottom of the sea. Two of them were found empty and afloat after the drugs had already been unloaded. The most recent one showed up on January 22 in the waters off the Costa da Morte (Coast of Death), and the previous one was located in March 2023 near the port of Vilagarcía, in Pontevedra province.

But international cooperation allowed the police to deal a decisive blow to drug traffickers after intercepting a fourth submersible on September 13 in A Pobra do Caramiñal (A Coruña), north of the Arousa estuary. For the first time, drugs transported by a narco-submarine were seized on land: 3,650 kilos of cocaine that had been carried by several speedboats onto a beach where officers even witnessed the unloading. Twelve people involved in the operation were arrested in the raid, including the three crew members of the submersible.

Three weeks later, another international operation on the high seas led to the boarding of a speedboat carrying 2.4 tons of cocaine off the coast of Lisbon. The shipment, destined for distribution to Europe through Galicia, was intercepted by a French Navy patrol boat as the crew was preparing to jettison it after being surprised by warning shots fired prior to the boarding.

Almost simultaneously, another four-ton cocaine shipment was seized by the Spanish National Police in an operation at sea involving GEO (Special Operations Group) agents aboard a Spanish Navy vessel. The Tanzanian-flagged merchant ship carrying the hidden cargo, which had sailed from Panama, was headed to the port of Vigo to unload part of its legal cargo. This cargo served as a front for a powerful organization that had been under investigation for months. All nine crew members of the merchant ship were arrested.

This past weekend, the Portuguese Navy seized another narco-submarine near the Azores with 1.7 tons of cocaine, a small amount compared to the usual cargo these vessels carry, leading authorities to believe that some of it had already been unloaded. It is still unknown whether its destination was Galicia, and they are waiting for the four detained crew members to reveal some details of the operation. In this context, another factor contributing to this surge in narcotics is the overproduction and stockpiling of cocaine, which, according to investigators, is being stored awaiting a recovery in prices, which have fallen by half in the last four years.

Vigo, a trade route for drug traffickers

A year and a half after the Vigo port container terminal inaugurated a new trade route to South America for the transport of frozen fruit and fish, which has yielded significant economic benefits, cocaine trafficking organizations have seen this maritime route as an opportunity to open up new markets. In fact, seizures have multiplied in this dock area, where there is a presence of Albanian and Belgian groups, members of the Balkan Clan, which controls the cocaine market in Europe and Latin America through major ports.

Operated by the German company Hapag-Lloyd, the weekly shipping line calls at ports such as Guayaquil in Ecuador, where the loading of cocaine makes it a key hub for the drug trade. The route also includes stops in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica. In addition to Vigo, the line connects with the Spanish cities of Málaga, Valencia and Barcelona, as well as three Italian ports, representing a significant volume of traffic with an estimated average of 300 cargo movements per vessel.

Increased police pressure at the port of Vigo has forced Customs to intensify controls using AI methods for drug detection, particularly in containers. This surveillance has diverted some shipments to Portugal, mainly Porto, where hauls destined for Galicia have been seized. The latest report from the State Attorney General’s Office, published last October, analyzes the drug trafficking situation in the Galician region and identifies the port of Vigo as a key hub on the smuggling route from South America.

The Pontevedra Prosecutor’s Office refers to the “significant cocaine seizures at the port of Vigo” that took place in 2024 and emphasizes the impossibility of “linking the substance to its senders or recipients.” It also points out that drug trafficking organizations operating in Galicia have “the capacity to detect and disable tracking devices and channel all their communications through instant messaging applications, encrypted or not, to avoid any surveillance or eavesdropping.” Therefore, it calls for “a review of the regulations governing the range of technological investigative measures and for better allocation of already available Artificial Intelligence resources.”

International cooperation is one of the methods proving most successful in the fight against drug trafficking, according to the Pontevedra Prosecutor’s Office, which highlights the increased cooperation between Portuguese and Spanish authorities. The exchange of information led to the discovery of a new method for concealing cocaine: wrapping it in cowhide. Although the drugs arrived in containers in Portugal last September, the epicenter of the operation was the Rías Baixas region of Galicia, where 19 individuals involved in this network were arrested. The group had moved at least 2,332 kilos of cocaine in two successive shipments using this novel method.

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