The article opens by pointing to young people camping in Spain, demonstrating in France, Serbia and Albania, and risking their lives to emigrate en masse in Africa and South America. It says these actions express deep malaise with the society inherited from older generations. At the ceremony for the awards bearing her name, Princess Leonor quoted Václav Havel: hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth defending regardless. The piece links this to Ernst Bloch's "principle of hope" as an active energy that drives people to transform reality.
The article says young protesters believe it is worth acting and hope to improve the reality they face. It cites Leonor describing times of "deep social disenchantment", inequality, conflict, populism and uncertainty, where enthusiasm is hard to sustain but hope persists among protesting youth. The piece asks whether these times are darker than earlier ones and answers yes for young Europeans: never has a generation had so many opportunities and so much training while facing such diminished life prospects relative to its capacities and to the options available in a rich developed world.
Using an economist's framing, it says the "frontier of possibilities" has never been so far from the "budget line" of scarce resources. It adds that social media and exhibitionism aggravate the contrast with many young people's reality. It then presents comparative data: real GDP per capita in Europe has multiplied by four since 1960, with Spain slightly higher. Over that period life expectancy rose from 67 to 80, welfare states expanded in education, health and pensions, working time fell and leisure and work-life balance increased, and civil liberties and equality advanced, including women's mass entry into the labour market.
On wages and purchasing power, the article identifies three stages: a spectacular rise from 1960 to 1980 that gave workers full access to consumption including housing; stabilization and worsening inequality from 1980 to 2010; and stagnation or decline from 2010 to the present, making daily life harder—shopping, energy, holidays and especially housing—and fueling social polarization. Young people are hit especially hard, facing above-average unemployment, greater precariousness, no defined career path and exclusion from housing.
The article says the social elevator has slowed or broken in some countries. Family income and wealth at birth now condition a young person's future much more than 40 years ago. The risk of poverty used to be concentrated among older people; today young people have a higher poverty rate. Young people are a group of high financial vulnerability, more dependent on family help than four decades ago. Average emancipation age was 20-22 then; now it is 26-27, with Spain an extreme case at 30.
In Spain, the piece says new pensions with guaranteed revaluation now exceed on average the salary of young workers, despite minimum wage increases, and young workers have lost purchasing power in recent years. It cites a CC OO report finding that Spanish housing prices have risen almost four times more than wages, so the effort to buy has gone from 3.1 annual salaries to 7.1. Rents in large Spanish cities represent between 80% and 110% of the average youth salary. Youth unemployment is close to 24% against a 10% overall rate, and young people are the group most affected by in-work poverty—which affects 12% of all workers, according to Oxfam Intermón—with hours and pay that do not lift them out of poverty.
The article contrasts 1968, when young people protested because they did not want to live like their parents, with today, when they protest because they do not want to live worse than their parents in a far richer society. It recalls that the first part of this disenchantment appeared more than 20 years ago in movements such as 15-M, and says everything has worsened for young people since: democracy has not answered their anxieties, as slogans like "they don't represent us" suggested, and disenchantment has turned into anger expressed in antisystem violence and support for the far right. It says society was warned and did nothing over 20 years. Paraphrasing Patti Smith, it concludes that people have (not yet) the power, and notes that a new railway accident like the one in Urda makes one want to protest, even if one is not young or hopeful.
Sources: El País Economía.