What I am going to tell you should be similar to what hundreds of thousands of parents are perceiving with concern: it will be almost impossible for my children to be able to buy a home in their first professional years in Valencia, or wherever; And that’s counting on them having a job with a decent salary, which is not an easy goal. If it is for rent, either they share a flat with other young people or they will have to do it with their partner; if they have it and if it works, given the exorbitant prices in which the real estate market is found. It is enough to take a look at the best-known portals to confirm that for less than 1,000 euros it is unlikely to find a flat for rent in this city, and that if it is a question of buying, they will need capital that will take years to accumulate. When my children, I have two, ask me what they can do about it, I don’t know what to answer them; his hopelessness moves me.
Our children, yours and mine, the best educated in the young Spanish democracy, with degrees, masters, several foreign languages ??and I don’t know how many titles for many things, from driving license to food handling license to work in summer or monitor, they observe the future with enormous pessimism. It is a radically different perception from the one I had in the 80s at the same age: I knew that academic effort and constant work would allow me to reach a level of quality of life similar to or higher than that of my parents, and that my professional expectations and vital would be compensated in a few years, in addition to allowing me to own a home, car and be able to pay for trips, all at the same time, calmly facing the necessary credits. The relationship between the cost of living and wages in those years had nothing to do with what is happening now. And, most importantly, I was going to feel part of a social movement for change.
My children, yours and their friends, add to their material despair the feeling that they are losing their status as citizens, key to the health of a liberal democracy; that the system is not only going to make emancipation difficult for them, but that they are outside the decision-making model, because, to aggravate the situation, they are fewer than the elderly, in a society, the European one, which in a few years will have a majority of citizens over 65 years of age. Sons and daughters of an old middle class, —a class that is close to disappearing—, who feel that society no longer counts on them and that any attempt to participate finds a harsh rejection from elders who want to perpetuate the advantages achieved up to the present. senescence. Later, some are surprised that a part of the young people vote for extremist formations or that they translate their hopelessness into vandalism; It seems that we are blind.
I have spoken to you about housing, an issue in which, let’s be honest, no party in the government has been able to do anything interesting for years: in the city of Valencia, with a left-wing government, the number of social housing built has been minimal, just a few dozen. I insist, with a left-wing government. Now everyone promises a legislature dedicated to this urgency. Without housing there is no autonomy or freedom, nor the privacy necessary to shape a life project. Together with the house, or before it, they will need a job, in a market where being a mileurista is almost being lucky. How can you set up a life today with a salary of 1,000 euros a month? Without a good job and without housing, young people are condemned to look at the world with anguish, with serious consequences.
Lately I have been reading many essays on the advance of the extreme right in Europe, and in the world; on the rise of nationalism, on the growth of the anti-system vote and also expert analysis on the displacement of the young vote to Vox. It is enough to talk to them to understand that it is not necessary to read so much; they are warning us, but we have lost the ability to listen. Later we will regret it.
