Europe looks at the mote in anothers eye and does not see the beam in its own

Published on June 02, 2026 | Translated from Spanish

The European press has become that neighbor who criticizes the dust on the house across the street while their own kitchen accumulates grease. They dedicate entire front pages to pointing out how other countries are managed, but avoid looking at their own structural problems. Meanwhile, at home, bureaucracy grows and transparency shrinks.

A European newsroom with a large digital screen showing a magnified view of a foreign city street, a small dust speck highlighted in red. In the foreground, a tangled mass of bureaucracy-themed cables and a transparent monitor displaying blurred, unreadable documents. A robotic arm with a dirty lens points a camera at the screen, ignoring a thick layer of grease and dust covering the control panel and CPU tower next to it. Cinematic technical illustration, photorealistic, dramatic side lighting, hyper-detailed metal and plastic textures, shallow depth of field focusing on the dirty hardware.

Digitally blind: when public software is a broken elevator 🛗

The European administration spends millions on legacy systems that work with the same reliability as a spiral staircase without a railing. Digitalization projects that promise efficiency end up with cost overruns and missed deadlines. Meanwhile, citizens fill out paper forms and wait weeks for a certificate that an algorithm could generate in seconds. The source code remains a mystery.

The community president gives themselves a raise and no one asks for receipts 💶

The curious thing is that these same newspapers demand audits from foreign governments, but when the local parliament votes itself a raise in allowances, the silence is deafening. It seems that investigative journalism works like the building's wifi: perfect for watching Netflix at the neighbor's house, but unable to load the homeowners' association page.