Young Spaniards have no grit, says Ayuso
Feijóo mentions the €1.5 trillion national debt "mortgage" but not how a PP government would pay it back.
🧑🤝🧑 What happened?
Spain’s opposition Popular Party leader Feijóo and the woman who could have been national leader back in April, Madrid First Minister Isabel Ayuso, appeared together to talk about young people and the economy. Ayuso criticised young people for a lack of effort, patience and grit.
👁️🗨️ Key quotes
“They have it all”, Ayuso said about young people, but “they are lacking that culture of effort that has been lost for many reasons […] the digital revolution […] is isolating them socially, is taking away their grit, their patience and their relations with other people”
“You have had some very difficult years”, said Feijóo: “We cannot resign ourselves to Spain being the country with the highest youth unemployment in the European Union […] I will not mortgage Spanish youth to stay in government […] we are very sorry that you have had to live through three crises one after the other”.
⚔️ What did they offer?
Feijóo repeated they typical speech on education, entrepreneurship and employment and crticised the left for “buying” and “subsidising” freedom before saying that his conservative government would do tax breaks and social security help for companies that hired more young people.
Ayuso argued that new technology was the big cause of loneliness, violence, gangs and even anorexia for young people and that the left wants them to “work less, study less and hate more”.
Feijóo said the left things young people belong to them and wants to leave them with “a mortgage of a trillion and a half euros” in national debt. He did not say how he would bring down that amount, which PP and PSOE governments together have grown energetically over the last 15 years.
📈 What do the numbers say?
The latest Eurostat numbers, for August, say Spain still has the second highest youth unemployment rate in Europe, at 26.6%, just behind Greece, at 28.6%, with both countries at double the European average of 13.8%.
Spain’s INE says unemployment among the under-25s was 28.52% in the second quarter of 2022. If you look at the graph, you can see how it has fallen from an enormous 57% during the financial and eurozone crises 10-15 years ago. It spiked back up to 40% during the pandemic.
€1.5 trillion in national debt, as we saw in August, is the lower of the three possible figures for how much Spain owes the world. As far as I know, no political party currently has a serious plan to deal with that and pay down that much money over however many years it takes.
🖼️ The big picture
Young people in Spain have spent fifteen years listening to politicians from one party or the other promise that they are going to fix youth, work-family balance, jobs, wages and housing, and the politicians are still trotting out the speeches and promises.
Of those young people who turned 18 in 2008, when the financial crisis was beginning, and who are now turning 32 in 2022, how many would say that their country, their politicians, their economy have given them the chance at the life and the future they imagined back then? How many dreams have been fulfilled and how many crushed, fourteen years later?
🍺 I don’t know where Ayuso goes to reach the conclusion that young people in Spain lack grit, a culture of effort, patience and knowing how to relate to others, but if you go into any bar in the country, you will see young waiters working hard for many hours, patientely relating to other people, to try to earn a decent wage.
☣️ During the pandemic, when I visited hospitals, I saw large numbers of young doctors, nurses, auxiliary nurses and cleaners who had first made an effort to get those jobs and who were at that time working extremely hard, with enormous amounts of patience and grit, to look after their sick Covid patients, suffering alongside them, wrapped for months in multiple layers of PPE, at constant risk to their own health and worried sick about infecting their own families when they got home, on double shifts, often to the point of exhaustion and tears, putting up with the effects of repeated coronavirus waves.
Not so the politicians and bureaucrats, in their comfy offices far from danger.