Power had almost fully returned to Spain early on Tuesday morning (April 29, 2025) as many questions remained about what caused one of Europe’s most severe blackouts that grounded flights, paralysed metro systems, disrupted mobile communications and shut down ATMs across Spain and Portugal.

By 6:30 a.m., more than 99% of energy demand in Spain had been restored, the country’s electricity operator Red Eléctrica said.

Power had gradually returned to several regions across Spain and Portugal as the nations reeled from the still-unexplained widespread blackout that had turned airports and train stations into campgrounds for stranded travelers. By Monday night, Portuguese grid operator REN said 85 out of 89 power substations were back online.

A security guard speaks with a woman outside a temporarily closed metro station during a nationwide power outage in Madrid on April 28, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Monday (April 28) night, many city residents, including in Spain’s capital of Madrid, went to sleep in total darkness. The normally illuminated cathedral spires of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia Basilica became indistinguishable from the night sky. Streets remained deserted even in neighborhoods where lights flickered back on, as people stayed home after a day of chaos.

“We have a long night ahead,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said when he addressed the European nation late on Monday (April 28). “We are working with the goal of having power restored to the entire country.”

In Madrid, cheers erupted from balconies where the electricity had returned.

People ride a crowded bus, after the metro was closed during a power outage, in Madrid, Spain on April 28, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

On Tuesday (April 29) morning, Madrid’s metro system said service would be restored on all but one line by 8 a.m., meaning that 80% of trains would be operating again during rush hour.

As metro service stopped on Monday (April 28), train stations cleared out and shops and offices closed, and thousands of people spilled onto the streets of Madrid.

Emergency workers in Spain said they rescued some 35,000 passengers stranded along railways and underground. By 11 p.m., there were still 11 trains backed up by the power loss awaiting evacuation, Mr. Sánchez said.

The blackout turned sports centers, train stations and airports into makeshift refuges late Monday.

People wait outside a closed metro station, during a major power outage in Barcelona, Spain on April 28, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
AP

“We were in the north of Portugal and did get any notifications until we got here because of internet outage,” said Ian Cannons, a British tourist trying to get home who was forced to spend the night in Lisbon’s airport. “We can’t book any hotels. Nothing.”

The Barcelona municipality distributed 1,200 cots to indoor recreation centers to host residents with no way to get home and international travelers left in limbo. All over Barcelona and Madrid, people were sleeping on train station benches and floors.

People walk through a metro station during a power outage in Madrid, Spain on April 28, 2025, in this screengrab obtained from a video posted on social media. Photo: Masha/Masha_Zha Via Reuters

As internet and mobile phone services blinkered offline across Spain and Portugal, battery-powered radios flew off the shelves. Those fortunate enough to find service shared whatever news updates they could with strangers on the street.

Lines snaked out of the few supermarkets running on backup generators in Barcelona and Lisbon as people stocked up on dried goods, water and battery-powered flashlights and candles. Clerks counted euros by hand, since many cash registers had stopped working.

Customers dine in a restaurant illuminated by a generator during a blackout in Barcelona, Spain on April 28, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
AP

Hector Emperador, picking his kids up from school in Barcelona, said he resorted to raiding his sons’ piggybank to ensure he had cash on hand after ATMs and some online-banking services shut down. “The coronavirus pandemic will be nothing compared to this,” he said.

Few gas stations were operating, sending the drivers who dared navigate without traffic lights scrambling for fuel. Residents with electric door keys found themselves locked out of their homes.

People board metros as the metro operations resume partially, after power begins to return following a huge outage that hit Spain and Portugal, in Madrid, Spain on April 29, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

The many inconveniences became a threat to survival for those with medical needs like refrigeration for insulin or power for dialysis machines and oxygen concentrators. Some hospitals — but not all — stayed open with the help of generators.

Officials did not say what caused the blackout, the second such serious European power outage in as many months after a fire at Heathrow Airport shut down Britain’s busiest travel hub on March 20.

They said there was little precedent for this kind of widespread electric failure across all of the Iberian Peninsula, with a combined population of some 60 million. Across the Mediterranean Sea, Spain’s Balearic Islands and the territories of Ceuta and Melilla were spared. The Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa were also spared.

“We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” Mr. Sánchez said, explaining how Spain’s power grid lost 15 gigawatts, the equivalent of 60% of its national demand, in just five seconds.

In his televised address late on Monday (April 28), Mr. Sánchez said that authorities were still investigating what happened. Portugal’s National Cybersecurity Center threw cold water on feverish speculation about foul play, saying there was no sign that the outage resulted from a cyber attack.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels, Teresa Ribera, an executive vice president of the European Commission, also ruled out sabotage. Nonetheless, the outage “is one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times,” she said.

If all goes to plan, Friedrich Merz will become the Federal Republic‘s 10th chancellor on May 6. The two remaining hurdles appear to be formalities: On Monday, his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will convene for a special party conference to approve the coalition contract with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Then, a few days later, the SPD’s members — some grumbling notwithstanding — are expected to approve the alliance in a vote, with the results announced on April 30.
But Merz won’t have long to enjoy the congratulations. Even though he won the national election in late February, the 69-year-old’s personal popularity seems to be on a permanent slide: According to an April poll by research institute Forsa for Stern magazine, just 21% of respondents consider Merz trustworthy — nine percentage points lower than in August, and down three points from January.
The same poll found that only 40% of respondents consider the incoming chancellor a strong leader, and 27% think Merz “knows what moves people,” both of which represent nine-point falls since January. On the plus side — indeed, the only leadership criteria in which Merz scored a majority in the survey — about 60% of respondents believe that Merz “speaks understandably.”
A not-so-grand coalition
It’s no shock that Merz isn’t exactly the most popular chancellor-in-waiting Germany has ever seen. But Ursula Münch, the director of the Tutzing Academy for Political Education in Bavaria, told DW that it’s not all his fault. “The circumstances are very different than they used to be,” Münch said. “We have a government that has a relatively small proportion of support among voters.”
Merz has not picked the most fortunate moment in history: In traditional political parlance, a coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD is called a “grand coalition,” because for many decades these two parties represented an overwhelming majority of Germany’s voters (sometimes well over 80%). In the fragmented landscape of 2025, in which parties have splintered and splintered again over the past 20 years, the two big centrist parties can only claim to represent 45% of voters, going by the February election results.
Merz’s trust issues
There are two obvious reasons why the perception of Merz’s trustworthiness might have fallen in the past few months. In January, Merz broke his own word when he became the first CDU leader to pass a motion through the Bundestag with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whole factions of which are deemed by intelligence agencies to be a threat to Germany’s democratic order.
For CDU supporters, however, that seemed like a less-egregious U-turn than the one Merz performed a few weeks later: In March, the party leader agreed a debt brake reform with the SPD and the Greens that paved the way for €1 trillion ($1.14 trillion) in new loans, something he had expressly ruled out throughout the election campaign.
Unsurprisingly, many of his voters felt betrayed. In a “Politbarometer” poll carried out by public broadcaster ZDF at the time, some 73% of Germans agreed that he had deceived voters — including some 44% of CDU/CSU supporters.
Merz’s head-through-the-wall attitude
Merz has problems that go much further back than hisrecent U-turns. Surveys have shown that he is particularly unpopular among women. A Forsa survey from March 2024 found that only 9% of women aged 18 to 29 saw Merz as their preferred chancellor candidate.
The incoming chancellor has been dogged with accusations of misogyny. In 1997, as is often brought up, he was one of the Bundestag members who voted against recognizing rape within marriage as a crime. In October last year, he was criticized for rejecting the idea of gender-balanced Cabinets, and this reputation was not helped by a photo released in February showing that the main negotiators of the CDU/CSU bloc were all middle-aged men.
Merz is also unpopular in eastern Germany, where he regularly polled behind both the AfD’s Alice Weidel and the SPD’s Olaf Scholz in the run-up to the election — partly, it seems, because of his belligerent attitude toward Russia.
Merz’s AfD problem
Merz’s calculation appears to be that, with right-wing populism apparently on rise around the world, what people want is straight-talking leadership. But populism does not appear to be making him more popular. In November 2018, when he first announced his candidacy to re-take the leadership of the CDU, Merz posted a tweet that seems to age worse with every month: “We can once again reach up to 40% and halve the AfD. That is possible!” he wrote. “But we must create the preconditions for it. That is our task.”
Almost the opposite has happened. Since Merz eventually re-took the CDU leadership in January 2022 (on his third attempt), the party’s poll ratings have stayed at 24%, while the AfD’s have not halved but doubled: From 11% to 24%. Germany’s far-right and center-right parties are now neck and neck.
But, of course, Merz has not had a chance to be chancellor yet, and Münch said he might yet be able to make good on his AfD prediction — if his government runs without the internal strife that dogged Scholz’s coalition, and if it is not hit by an external crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic or escalating war in Ukraine that would requires the chancellor to take more U-turns and lose even more trust. Those are big ifs.
“The best way to keep the AfD small isn’t making some random announcement about big changes in refugee policy that you can’t implement,” Münch said. “It’s concrete measures that people also notice. But that’s not something that a new government can just turn around overnight. People need to be given confidence again, and that will only be possible when the economic forecast turns more positive and the refugee numbers fall.”
Merz was initially considered a strong candidate precisely because of his business background (he was on the board at the investment company BlackRock for several years), which was supposed to signal his economic acumen. In the past few years, however, his populist statements have increasingly been about immigration, and that hasn’t helped him shake off the AfD.

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