Spain's pre-war mood is felt in paychecks, not on the streets

Stagnant wages and rising prices: the unease they call pre-war

The pre-war mood isn't measured in the streets. It's measured in paychecks, and paychecks have been stagnant for years while the shopping basket gets more expensive. Hence the diagnosis repeated daily: aggressive people, bad vibes, it's brutal. The tension isn't attributed to a specific spark, but to a date one participant sets at 2008, and to a steady erosion lasting nearly two decades. The forecast is as firm as it is debatable: nothing explodes overnight, but the ground sinks every quarter.

The diagnosis: tension rising since 2008

Those who hold this thesis don't talk about war, but about a mood simmering on low heat: burned-out workforces who put up with it because they can't afford to lose their pay, contained violence that only surfaces in private gatherings and conversations among friends. The underlying argument is that part of the tension is covered up with public money whose bill is passed to the future, and that at some point austerity will hit.

The most cited objection is common sense: if this were pre-war, shops would be empty. And they're not. Anyone on the street sees pre-Christmas cheer, Black Friday and packed shopping centres. The tension diagnosis, they say, is made from inside the bubble, not from the pavement.

The wage that doesn't rise and the basket that does

The economic core of the unease is a commonplace almost nobody disputes: prices rise steadily and wages have been flat for years. Most people work, get up early and barely make it to the end of the month, with no room for a bad day. The self-employed are also in a bad mood, according to the same account.

Public employees are also part of the mix, described as exhausted routines dealing with other people's anger and coping with equally fed-up colleagues. The repeated advice is pure survival: avoid trouble with strangers. Anyone could be looking to take out their frustration on the first face they see.

Why doesn't anything explode? The anaesthesia of transfers

Here comes the strongest argument of the whole diagnosis. As long as money keeps coming, even if it's little, nobody risks anything. The extra payment and the pension are deposited on the 24th in areas like Benidorm and Torrevieja, and those who hold this view use it as proof that, as long as the payments keep dropping, people let everything slide.

The trigger won't be ideological, but food-related. If pensions, unemployment benefits or social rights are cut, the day of adjustment will be the day of chaos, because those who row, endure and stay silent will finally have little to lose. It's a prediction that gets repeated and is also hard to date.

From lockdown to the DANA: the precedents cited

To gauge how much rope the population has left, recent memory is invoked. In 2020 there was applause from balconies, and comparisons with other countries come up: in Serbia the parliament was burned, and in Switzerland, with millions of guns in private hands and half a million people attending shooting clubs, they didn't dare make a move. The contrast serves to argue that local endurance is enormous.

The institutional deployment after the DANA in Valencia and its metropolitan area is also reviewed, where a one-off neighbourhood incident in Paiporta led, according to one participant, to a disproportionate operation. At the same time, part of the discontent is channelled into daily coexistence and immigration: there the diagnosis stops being economic and becomes identity-based, with figures used without sources. There is talk of 10 million residents of foreign origin and they are blamed for part of that unease.

Armament, birth rate and calendar

Military spending works as a thermometer for the forecast. The commitment of 2% of GDP on defence within NATO is mentioned, and a 5% scenario for armament is speculated, with industry ready to cash in. For those who hold the pre-war thesis, that rearmament is a sign rather than a warning: preparing the house is acknowledging the storm.

Demographics complete the picture. The fall in the birth rate is interpreted as a leading indicator of distrust in the future. And three dates are cited as successive correctives: 1978, 2008 and 2020, each of which would have left the population with less margin than the previous one.

If anything can be predicted from these ingredients, it's that an outbreak, if it happens, won't look like a war. It will be slow, uneven and shaped like austerity: first the cut, then the noise. Caution is mandatory, because the sequence depends less on accumulated outrage than on when the fiscal tap is turned off. And that tap, for now, is still open.