BARCELONA – It had all the marks of a confrontation for freedom of expression: Pablo Hasél, a controversial Spanish rapper, barricaded himself on a university campus to avoid a nine-month prison sentence on the charge of glorifying terrorism and denigrating the monarchy. While the students surrounded him, the police with riot gear entered; Mr. Hasél raised his fist in challenge as he was taken away.
But Oriol Pi, a 21-year-old from Barcelona, saw something more when watching the events that unfolded last week on Twitter. He thought about the job he had as an event manager before the pandemic and how he was fired after the blockades. He thought of the curfew and the mandates of the masks that he found unnecessary for young people. He thought about how his parents’ generation had faced nothing like it.
And he thought it was time for Spanish youth to take to the streets.
“My mom thinks this has to do with Pablo Hasél, but it’s not just that,” said Pi, who joined the protests that broke out in Barcelona last week. “Everything exploded. It is a collection of so many things that you need to understand. “
For nine nights, the streets of this coastal city, long silent due to pandemic curfews, exploded in sometimes violent demonstrations that spread through Madrid and other Spanish centers. What started as a protest against Hasel’s accusation has become a collective outcry from a generation that sees not only a future lost to itself, but also a gift that has been stolen, years and experiences that it will never have back, even when the pandemic is gone.
The frustration of young people as a result of the pandemic is not limited to Spain alone. Across Europe, university life has been profoundly curtailed or overturned by the limitations of virtual classes.
Social isolation is as endemic as contagion itself. Anxiety and depression have reached alarming rates among young people almost everywhere, experts and mental health studies have found. Police and especially young protesters also clashed in other parts of Europe, including last month in Amsterdam.
“It is no longer the same for those who are 60 years old – or those who are 50 with life experience and everything organized – as it is for those who are 18 years old and have the feeling that every hour they lose to this pandemic, it’s like losing their whole life, ”said Enric Juliana, an opinion columnist for La Vanguardia, Barcelona’s leading newspaper.
Barcelona was once a city of music festivals on the beach and bars open all night, leaving few better places in Europe to be young. But the crisis, which devastated tourism and shrunk the national economy by 11% last year, was a catastrophe for Spain’s young adults.
It is a case of déjà vu for those who also lived through the 2008 financial crisis, which had one of the biggest losses in Spain. As then, young people had to return to their parents’ homes, and their initial jobs were the first to disappear.
But, unlike previous economic crises, the pandemic has reached a much deeper cut. It happened at a time when unemployment for people under 25 was already high in Spain, at 30%. Now 40% of young Spaniards are unemployed, the highest rate in Europe, according to European Union statistics.
For someone like Pi, the arrest of rapper Hasél and his challenge of anger against the machine have become a symbol of the frustration of young Spaniards.
“I loved that the man went out with his fist in the air,” said Pi, who said he had not heard of the rapper before Spain denounced him. “It’s about fighting for your freedom, and he did it until the last minute.”
The case of Hasél, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla Duró, is also sparking a debate about freedom of expression and Spain’s efforts to limit it.
The authorities have accused Mr. Hasél under a law that allows prison terms for certain types of incendiary statements. Hasél, known as both a provocateur and a rapper, accused the Spanish police of brutality, compared judges to Nazis, and even celebrated ETA, a Basque separatist group that went bankrupt two years ago after decades of bloody terrorist campaigns that left some 850 people dead.
In 2018, a Spanish court sentenced him to two years in prison, although it was later reduced to nine months. The accusation focused on his posts on Twitter and a song he wrote about former king Juan Carlos, whom Hasél called “mafioso”, among other insults. (The former king abdicated in 2014 and left Spain entirely last summer for the United Arab Emirates amid a corruption scandal.)
“What he said at the trial is that he was put in prison for telling the truth, because what he says about the king, in addition to all the insults, is exactly what happened,” said Fèlix Colomer, a 27-year-old documentary filmmaker. years old. who met Mr. Hasél while exploring a project about his trial.
Colomer, who led the Barcelona protesters on certain nights, noted that others were sued in Spain for comments on social media, a worrying sign for Spanish democracy, in his opinion. A Spanish rapper known as Valtònyc fled to Belgium in 2018 after receiving a prison sentence for his lyrics that a court found he glorified terrorism and insulted the monarchy – accusations similar to the ones Hasel faces.
However, some think Hasel has crossed the line in his lyrics. José Ignacio Torreblanca, professor of political science at the National University of Distance Education in Madrid, said that although the use of the law worried him, Hasél was not the right figure to build a youth movement around.
“He is no Joan Baez, he is actively justifying and promoting violence. This is clear in your songs. He says things like, ‘I would like a bomb to explode under your car,’ ”said Torreblanca, referring to a song by Hasél calling for the murder of a Basque government official and another saying that a Catalonian mayor“ deserved it ” a bullet. “
Amid public pressure growing even before the protests, the Ministry of Justice said on Monday that it planned to change the country’s penal code to reduce sentences related to the types of speech violations for which Hasél was convicted.
But for Nahuel Pérez, a 23-year-old who works in Barcelona caring for the mentally disabled, freedom for Hasél is just the beginning of his worries.
Since arriving in Barcelona five years ago from his hometown on the tourist island of Ibiza, Pérez 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 closed environment meant that social distance was impossible.
“The youth of this country is in a very deplorable state,” he said.
After Hasél was arrested at the university, Pi, who had seen the news on Twitter, began to see people announcing protests on the Telegram messaging app. He told his mother that he wanted to go to the demonstrations, but she didn’t seem to understand why.
“I’m not going to look for him at the police station,” was what she told him, said Pi.
He thought about what it must have been like for his mother at his age.
There was no pandemic. Spain was growing. She was a teacher and married in her 20s with another professional, Mr. Pi’s father. The two found a home and started a family.
Mr. Pi, by contrast, is an adult who still lives with his mother.
“Our parents received all the good fruit and here’s what we’re up against: there is no more fruit on the tree, because they have harvested the best of them,” said Mr. Pi. “All that was the good life, the best in Spain – there was none of that left for us.”
When not at the protests, Pi spends his days working as a tutor at a nearby school that operates a mix of online and socially remote classroom classes.
It is not the career he wanted – no career, he says – but it pays the bills and allows him to talk to high school students to get an overview of the situation in Spain.
He does not measure words about what is to come for them.
“These are the people I will be in ten years,” he said. “I think they are hearing something that no one has ever told them. I would have heard if someone had come to me when I was 12 and said, ‘Listen, you are going to have to fight for your future.’ “
Roser Toll Pifarré contributed reporting from Barcelona and Raphael Minder from Madrid.