Guys - while it is easy(!) to lay the blame at the company's door, I have a feeling that most of the delays you are incurring at the moment in France and Spain are to do with (unofficial) industrial action which is affecting all airlines equally.
As has been alluded to already, the Spanish Air Traffickers are in dispute with their management about, amongst other things, creating over-capacity in various sectors by allowing short cuts and early departures. And now the French appear to be coming out in sympathy. (Check the R&N and ATC fora for more info.)As a result controller discretion is no longer being used - you are ready to leave early; tough you wait until your filed departure time. You're running late and want to take a visual approach to cut 50 miles off your arrival; tough you must fly the whole procedure adhering to all height and speed restrictions, wasting time and burning unnecessary fuel.
Add to that the the usual summer occurrence of slots - or a time delay incurred on the ground so you shouldn't have to hold in the air, and the controller's insistence that you make that slot to the minute. For example out of Madrid, the taxi time to the northerly runways is set at 20 minutes; usually we can make it from push back to airborne in 10-15 minutes. However if you are not ready to push at exactly slot -20 you've now missed your slot, never mind the fact you can make up time during taxi or the discretion that controllers usually utilise in letting you go up to 5 minutes ahead of or 10 minutes later than your published restriction. So you get a new slot which typically tends to be 30-60 minutes later.
Compound that throughout the day (one slot into Europe, another one leaving) plus our self-inflicted tardiness, weather etc and sizeable delays start building up. Now add in the flight duty limitations of the crew – where after a certain period spent on duty you can no longer legally fly so standby crew and/or aircraft need to be called out – and you can see why some of the delays and cancellations happen, especially to the later flights.
I'm not apologising for the company - they can be shockingly bad when things go wrong – just trying to highlight some of the issues that we are encountering on a daily basis at the moment.