You all know Quino's mythical cartoon in which Susanita, Mafalda's friend, proposes to organize banquets of "chicken and turkey and suckling pig and all that..." to raise funds to buy the poor "flour, semolina, noodles and those crap they eat."
Mafalda would then open those eyes like saucers that she would open, so big that today they would no longer fit in the cartoon before what is happening.
Like a modern Susanita, the British Minister of Education gave out interviews this week wearing her 12,000-euro Rolex while asking teachers to contain wages;
banks display their war profits like modern-day Mr. Scrooge;
Energy companies like Shell manage to increase their profits by 110% in one year!
while their clients, be they nurses, teachers, railway workers, civil servants or the unemployed, do not make ends meet.
And in Spain, President Sánchez himself cries out in the Senate against the loss of purchasing power by telling us, as if we didn't know, that a home has gone from costing four annual salaries in 1999 to eight in 2023. But hasn't he been four? years in command?
The inequality of our time is obscene.
The gap between elites and ordinary citizens is widening.
Health, a key tool for equality in our welfare state, deteriorates while those who can pay for private policies.
And the taxes on extraordinary benefits that the Government has approved are answered by the elites with total indifference to the common reality.
At the heart of this reality lies a major problem, perhaps the greatest sign of separation between the already established wealthy people and the young people who are just starting out.
And it is the house.
The impossibility of agreeing to buy or rent a flat is marking entire generations destined to share, to stay in their parents' house and to postpone any full emancipation.
And then we want them to be adults.
Resolving the housing drama, undoing the knot that has been tied and that locks these generations in a disabling limbo should be the priority of any Government at all levels of the Administration.
The solution to the problem, be it by way of public housing, rent caps, limits on the hoarding of flats or any model that brings us closer to other European countries where the situation is not so dramatic, will be the Rosetta stone of the language of this age.
Whoever achieves it will have transformed Spain.
For the better.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber