EL PAÍS chronicles the days running up to the spring lockdown and what came after in an era that some ministers describe as the worst of their lives
Just two years earlier, none of the three main protagonists taking the most difficult decision of a generation could have imagined doing so. Running fourth in the polls, Pedro Sánchez came to power through an unexpected no-confidence motion against then prime minister Mariano Rajoy of the conservative Popular Party (PP). Salvador Illa, a member of the Catalonia Socialist Party (PSC) and a philosophy graduate, never thought the Health Ministry was for him; and Fernando Simón, a high-ranking PP appointee, had kept to the wings since the Ebola crisis…
© ‘Stop everything that has to be stopped’: The inside story of Spain’s coronavirus state of alarm – El Pais