How distant that other January seems, that of 2007. The then Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, predicted that in a short time Spain would surpass Germany in per
capita income
.
The famous “irrational exuberance”, in the phrase of Alan Greenspan, president of the Federal Reserve, had taken over everything: money was cheap, construction was going on at a frenetic pace, banks granted delirious mortgages that they later cut up and sold, camouflaged as bonuses to your customers.
And finally, in 2008, that burst.
The neoliberal system born around 1980 ended as it had to end: as a big scam.
Four events have determined the course of the 21st century.
The attacks of 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, the pandemic in 2020 and the war in Ukraine, which began in 2014, but had planetary effects from 2022, with the Russian attack on the entire Ukrainian territory.
We still don't know how the war will evolve.
So far, despite the enormous risk of conflict, nothing has been as damaging to liberal democracies as the Great Recession.
Let's think about it for a moment.
Institutions failed, all of them, and that eroded their prestige.
It was the lowest incomes that paid most of the crisis, and that aggravated inequalities.
In Europe, the two countries where the gap between rich and poor widened the most were the United Kingdom and Spain.
Not even in Greece was the thing so exaggerated.
It is no coincidence that two referendums were called in the United Kingdom, one on the independence of Scotland (2014) and another in 2016 on leaving the European Union, with the well-known consequences: British politics and the economy continue to be devalued.
Nor is it by chance that bipartisanship collapsed in Spain and, above all, that in Catalonia the independence movement jumped from the folkloric sphere to a relative social majority.
The consequences are equally well known.
The discrediting of the elites propelled populism to levels not seen since, in 1929, the previous Great Recession paved the way for the greatest carnage in human history.
Demagogy has become the dominant feature of contemporary politics.
Donald Trump was not an accident: to a greater or lesser extent, no democracy is free from threats.
In a context other than that of 1848, Karl Marx's phrase was fulfilled: everything solid vanished into thin air.
We have enough perspective to gauge the devastation caused by the Great Recession and to know that its consequences are not over.
We live in a time of institutional fragility and social fragmentation.
The interesting thing about the matter is that the neoliberal system has died (State interventionism continues to increase despite, paradoxically, its weakness) and has not been replaced.
Fiscal mechanisms continue to defraud the weakest, the new generations do not get out of precariousness and uncertainty, the rich are getting richer, pessimism and nostalgia mark our time.
In the words of Antonio Gramsci, “the old dies and the new cannot be born”: we are stuck in the interregnum from which monsters arise.
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