Arturo Pérez-Reverte blames Spain's unrest on resentment, not poverty

Arturo Pérez-Reverte argues that street riots cannot be explained by poverty alone, but by a resentment manufactured by a society that promises success and hands out failure. His thesis mixes a sharp diagnosis with a debatable conclusion: blaming the "desire factory" does not excuse whoever burns a car.

The writer **Arturo Pérez-Reverte** has once again weighed into the debate on street violence with an article arguing that the riots cannot be explained solely by poverty or by the immigrant background of those involved. His central thesis is that Europe mass-produces individuals for whom breaking something is the only way to exist, and that this factory is not in the peripheries or at the borders, but at the heart of what he calls our contradictory factory of desires and grudges.

The text opens with a personal recollection: twenty-five years ago he wrote an article titled La mochila y el currículum (The Backpack and the CV), after crossing paths with a young man handing out photocopies of his university degree. Back then he wondered when that kid would carry a molotov cocktail in his backpack instead of a CV. Now, he says, he knows. The image is powerful and sums up the argument well: the broken promise as fuel for rage.

## The broken promise of social mobility

Pérez-Reverte describes a deal that seemed simple: study, work, pay your taxes and you will have a home, a family and a month at the beach. It was not paradise, he concedes, but it seemed possible. Today, he adds, you can have a university degree and be an Amazon delivery rider. The word mensaka refers to a courier, a job that in Spain thousands of university graduates chain together on precarious contracts.

The diagnosis has empirical support. Spain's youth unemployment rate has hovered around **30%** over the past decade, according to data from the Labour Force Survey published by the **INE** (Spain's national statistics institute). Temporary work and overqualification affect a considerable share of those who complete higher education. The writer cites no figures, but his description of the mismatch between education and employment chimes with a documented reality.

His thesis goes beyond poverty. He argues that millions of poor people work, care for their own and endure humiliation with dignity. What explains violence, in his view, is not lacking something, but believing it is being stolen from you. The distinction between poverty and the certainty of being cheated is the backbone of his argument. And he adds a contemporary element: shop windows and social media display daily what you will never have. A kid from the neighbourhood has breakfast watching someone his age wake up in a Dubai mansion, drive a Ferrari and share a pool with an influencer. The message, he says, is clear: this is success, wise up or get lost.

## Rebellion without utopia: the diagnosis of resentment

One of the most suggestive contributions of the text is the distinction between the classic revolutionary and today's rioter. The revolutionaries of old, he writes, had ideas: they wanted to replace one order with another, even if they often gave birth to monsters. Now it is different. You do not storm the Winter Palace, you torch the car dealership and loot the expensive clothing store. You are not seeking power, but telling it to get stuffed for a while. It is rebellion without utopia, rage that does not even aspire to win.

That characterization fits what sociology has described in recent urban riots in Europe. The looting of luxury shops and the burning of bins do not pursue a political programme, but momentary visibility. Pérez-Reverte puts it bluntly: whoever is nobody feels like a protagonist when the antiestéticar and attention of others grant the power life denied them. The victims, he stresses, are modest residents and small shopkeepers. Resentment, he adds, is not a school of critical thinking: it shoots blindly.

The writer rejects tribal explanations. Some point to immigrants, others to the far left, others to the far right, others discover an international conspiracy. Everyone picks their culprits and preens themselves with a flourish of sarracena superiority, he writes. His answer is that those behind the riots did not step off a dinghy yesterday: they were born here, went to school here and learned to desire what everyone else does. We raised them, he concludes, and their frustration is shaped by the Europe where they grow up and fail.

## The mirror of the exemplary citizens

The article does not stop at the violent. Pérez-Reverte extends the criticism to what he calls the hate fair of the exemplary citizens, those who do not burn bins but take part in a public conversation full of tribes, enemies and resentment. Millions of people convinced that their happiness depends on others' misfortune. Political parties, that business where so many useless crooks thrive, know that resentment wins more votes than solutions, he argues.

The symmetry he draws is uncomfortable: some burn cars and others poison social media. In response, the truncheon league demands police, laws and prisons; the good-vibes crowd demands subsidized projects, confident that three republican flags and a charity marathon dissolve decades of bitterness. Someone else's bitterness, of course. Never their own. Here the text abandons analysis and enters the terrain of political opinion, doing so without providing data to back up the equivalence between street violence and online rhetoric.

The diagnosis becomes most solid in the final stretch. We are not witnessing the destruction of a civilized society by savage hordes, he writes, but proof that it produces citizens unable to find a place in it. He acknowledges that inequalities can be reduced, housing made cheaper, schools improved and discrimination fought, and that each of these measures will change lives. But relieving symptoms is one thing and curing the disease another. Nobody votes for whoever has the nerve to announce that their children will live worse.

## What can be challenged in his thesis

Pérez-Reverte's conclusion is that the barbarians no longer come from the other side of the border: they are inside. We have spent decades handing out lighters and now we are shocked that the streets are burning. The privileged wanted to keep their world, the revolutionary to transform it, but the resentful will settle for watching it burn. Promises will not appease someone who knows they are all lies.

There is a logical flaw in the argument worth pointing out. Explaining resentment is not the same as justifying it, and the author himself knows it: whoever bashes a passer-by's head in is not drafting a manifesto of social justice. But by placing the ultimate cause in a diffuse social factory, the text dilutes the individual responsibility of the offender. It is legitimate to ask why Europe generates rage; it is less legitimate to use that question to assign blame upwards and sideways, as the author himself does when he fires at politicians, the media and exemplary citizens.

The generalization is also debatable. Urban riots have heterogeneous causes: sometimes they are repressed political protests, sometimes opportunistic looting, sometimes conflicts between groups. Reducing them to a single explanation, manufactured resentment, simplifies a reality the text itself acknowledges as complex when it describes the scene: police, hooded youths, extreme violence and opportunistic politicians.

What remains, after reading it carefully, is a text that is right to point out the contradiction between the promises of success and the real precarity of a generation, and wrong to turn that contradiction into a total theory. The uncomfortable question he himself raises, why Europe manufactures individuals for whom breaking something is the only way to exist, deserves an answer. But the answer cannot be, as the article implies, that the blame lies with everyone and no one at once. If the resentful will settle for watching it burn, someone will have to put out the fire. And that someone is not an abstract factory of desires: it is a concrete society with institutions, budgets and political decisions that can be voted for or against. Pérez-Reverte's article invites reflection; it also invites distrust of anyone who points to so many culprits that, in the end, no one answers for anything.