Prospectiveness has something of the Gramscian phrase about the pessimism of the intelligence and the optimism of the will. 2024 has begun with an uncertainty that contaminates everything. Hamas’ savage attack and the Netanyahu Government’s criminal response are weakening Biden’s re-election chances, heading for a grim November in which Trump can win again. And not only that, it has unleashed an anti-Semitic wave throughout Europe, which continues to grow and which permeates a part of the left, by action or omission. At the same time, the European extreme right is gaining muscle day by day, with the possibility of ringing the bell in the European elections, in which it will be essential that the social democratic bloc erects itself as a wall of containment in the face of the Party’s flirtation Popular European (and Spanish) with the ultras.

And despite the threats, there is one thing that keeps the flame of optimism alive. It could be said that Europe has been built precisely on this Gramscian impulse. From the pessimism of the intelligentsia born of the infamy of the 20th century, the dream of building a united Europe emerged. The will that “never again” such destruction occur on the continent. Thinking about it I returned to Albert Camus. In all his extensive work, he reveals an ethics and a humanism without parion. When he received the Nobel, in a beautiful speech about the commitment of the artist, he said: “Undoubtedly, each generation believes itself destined to remake the world. Mine knows she won’t be able to do it. But his task is perhaps greater. It consists in preventing the world from falling apart”.

This weekend, thousands of people demonstrated in Germany against the possibility of the far-right party AfD winning the elections in several eastern states in September. Just after a meeting between the AfD and neo-Nazis took place to study a plan to expel non-natives from the country. The demonstrators who took to the streets remind us that fatality can be avoided: for the moment they will not be able to remake Germany by stopping the causes that propel the ultras, but with their civic awakening they make us think that, even if the omens are pessimistic, in 2024 it can end better than it started.