BARCELONA – It had all the hallmarks of a free speech showdown: Pablo Hasél, a controversial Spanish rapper, barricaded himself on a university campus to avoid a nine-month prison sentence on charges of glorifying terrorism and dismantling the monarchy has. As students surrounded him, police pulled into riot gear; Mr. Hasel raised his fist in defiance when he was taken away.
But Oriol Pi, a 21-year-old in Barcelona, saw something more when he followed the events on Twitter last week. He thought about the work he had before the pandemic as an event manager, and how he was fired after the closing period. He thinks of the evening clock and the mask mandates he feels are unnecessary for young people. He thinks about how his parents’ generation faced such a thing.
And he thought it was time for the youth of Spain to take to the streets.
“My mother thinks it’s about Pablo Hasél, but it’s not just that,” he said. Pi said, joining the protests that erupted in Barcelona last week. “Everything just exploded. This is a whole collection of so many things you need to understand. ”
For nine nights, the streets of this coastal city, silent from pandemic curfews, erupted into sometimes violent protests that spread to Madrid and other Spanish hubs. What started as a protest action over the prosecution of Mr. Hazel, has become a collective cry by a generation that not only sees a lost future for itself, but also a gift that has been robbed, for years and experiences that it will never come back, even when the pandemic is away.
The frustration of young people as a result of the pandemic is not just Spain alone. Across Europe, university life has been deeply curtailed or turned upside down by the limitations of virtual classes.
Social isolation is just as endemic as the infection itself. Anxiety and depression reached an alarming rate almost everywhere, experts and mental health found. Police and mostly young protesters also clashed in other parts of Europe, including in Amsterdam last month.
‘It’s not the same now for a person of 60 – or a 50-year-old with life experience and everything that is completely organized, just as it is for a person who is now 18 and feels that he is suffering from this pandemic every hour lose. , it’s like losing their whole life, ”says Enric Juliana, an opinion columnist for La Vanguardia, the leading newspaper in Barcelona.
Barcelona was once a city of music festivals on the beach and all-night bars, leaving few better places in Europe to be young. But the crisis, which devastated tourism by 11 percent last year and caused the national economy to shrink, was a disaster for the young adults of Spain.
This is an example of déjà vu for those who also went through the 2008 financial crisis, which took one of its heaviest tolls in Spain. As then, young people had to return to their parents’ homes, with entry-level jobs disappearing among the first.
But unlike the economic downturn in the past, the pandemic cuts much deeper. It hit at a time when unemployment for people under 25 was already 30 percent in Spain. Now 40 percent of the youth in Spain are unemployed, according to European Union statistics the highest percentage in Europe.
For someone like mr. Pi has announced the arrest of rapper Mr. Hazel and his rage against the machine became a symbol of the frustration of Spain’s young people.
“I loved that the man left with his fist in the air,” he said. Pi said, who said he had not heard from the rapper before Spain charged him. “It’s about fighting for your freedom, and he did it until the last minute.”
The case of mr. Hasél, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla Duró, also sparked a debate on freedom of speech and Spain’s efforts to restrict it.
The authorities arrested Mr. Hazel charged under a law that allows jail time for certain types of assaults. Mr Hasél, known just as much as a rapper as a rapper, accused the Spanish police of brutality, comparing judges to Nazis and even celebrating ETA, a Basque separatist group that folded two years ago after decades of bloody terrorist campaigns that left about 850. people dead.
In 2018, a Spanish court sentenced him to two years in prison, although it was later reduced to nine months. The prosecution focused on his Twitter posts and a song he wrote about former King Juan Carlos, which Mr. Hazel called a “Mafioso”, among other insults. (The former king resigned in 2014 and completely destroyed Spain amid a corruption scandal last summer for the United Arab Emirates.)
“What he said during the trial is that they put him in jail because he told the truth, because what he says about the king, except for all the insults, is exactly what happened,” Felix Colomer said. a 27-year-old documentary filmmaker, said. what mr. Hasél got to know him while investigating a project about his trial.
Mr. Colomer, who on some nights led the leaders of the Barcelona protesters, noted that others in Spain were persecuted for commenting on social media, a worrying sign for Spain’s democracy. A Spanish rapper known as Valtònyc fled to Belgium in 2018 after being jailed for his lyrics that the court found glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy – charges similar to those of Mr. Hazel faces.
However, some feel that Mr. Hazel crossed a line in his lyrics. José Ignacio Torreblanca, a professor of political science at the National Distance Education University in Madrid, said that while the use of the law bothered him, Mr. Hazel is not the right figure to build a youth movement.
“He’s not Joan Baez, he justifies and promotes violence. This is evident in his songs. He says things like, “I wish a bomb exploded under your car,” he said. Torreblanca said, referring to a song by Mr. Hazel who requested the assassination of a Basque government official and another who said that a mayor of Catalonia ‘deserves a bullet. ‘
Amid public pressure that increased even before the protests, the Ministry of Justice said on Monday that it intends to change the country’s criminal code to reduce sentences related to the type of speech offenses for which Hasél was sentenced.
But for Nahuel Pérez, a 23-year-old man who works in Barcelona to care for the mentally handicapped, freedom for Mr. Hazel only the beginning of his worries.
Since Pérez arrived in Barcelona from his hometown on the resort island of Ibiza five years ago, he has said he has not found a job with a salary high enough to cover the cost of living. To save money on rent, he recently moved into an apartment with four other roommates. The close proximity means that social distance was impossible.
“The youth of this country are in a deplorable state,” he said.
After Hasél was arrested at the university, Mr. Pi, who saw the news on Twitter, is starting to see people announcing protests in the messaging program Telegram. He told his mother he wanted to go to the protests, but she did not seem to fully understand why.
“I’m not going to look for you at the police station,” she told him. Pi said.
He thought about what it must have been like for his mother at his age.
There was no pandemic. Spain flourished. She was a teacher and was married in her twenties to another professional person, mr. Pi’s father. The two found a home and raised a family.
Mr. Pi, on the other hand, is an adult still living with his mother.
“Our parents got all the good fruit and here’s what we come across: there is no more fruit in the tree because they took the best of it,” said Mr. Pi said. “Everything that was the good life, the best of Spain – there is nothing left of us.”
If he is not at the protests, Mr. spends. Pi spent his days as a hall monitor in a nearby school running a mix of online classes and socially distributed classes.
It’s not the career he wanted – not a career at all, he says – but it pays the bills and lets him talk to high school students to get their views on the situation in Spain.
He does not speak words about what lies ahead for them.
“These are the people I will be in ten years,” he said. “I think they hear something no one has ever told them. I would have listened if someone had come to me when I was 12 and said, ‘Listen, you’ll have to struggle for your future.’ ‘
Roser Toll Pifarré reported from Barcelona, and Raphael Minder from Madrid.