The Dominant Question.
Joan Cañete: 'How Does It Affect Me?' Dominates Public Economic Conversation.
A question is reshaping how people think about politics: "How does this affect me?" El Periódico deputy director Joan Cañete published an analysis on June 16, 2024, arguing that this single question has replaced the older civic instinct of asking what is good for society as a whole. Cañete warns it is "the death of the future" — a shift that makes collective problems nearly impossible to solve.
The shift is not abstract. In Spain's June 9 European Parliament elections, the movement "S'ha Acabat la Festa" (Se Acabó la Fiesta) won 800,000 votes with zero traditional campaigning. Its entire message: the system is taking from you personally. For Cañete, that result is a symptom of something much deeper.
From Citizen to Consumer: How the Shift Happened
Cañete introduces a key term: the "consumer-citizen." This is a voter who treats the State like a store. If the service is bad — housing too expensive, healthcare too slow — the consumer-citizen feels free to opt out. That might mean supporting anti-tax movements or backing candidates who promise to tear the whole system down.
The roots go back decades. Cañete draws a line from Margaret Thatcher's 1987 claim — "There is no such thing as society" — to today's digital age. But he notes a key difference. Thatcherism was an ideology. Today's individualism is a "visceral reaction" to economic precariousness, not a political philosophy.
Housing Crisis and Economic Anxiety Drive the 'Me' Mindset
The numbers behind the frustration are real. In Barcelona, rent has risen 68% over the last decade, according to housing data from Diario de Mallorca, while salaries have barely moved. For people under 40, the common good feels like a luxury they cannot afford. Survival comes first.
El Correo Web notes that CIS data from June 2024 shows 43.4% of Spaniards name economic problems as their top personal concern. Yet when asked about Spain's biggest problem overall, they point to political dysfunction and politicians' behavior. That gap — between personal pain and political distrust — is exactly the space where the "How does it affect me?" question grows.
TikTok Politics and the Rise of Alvise Pérez
Cañete points to digital influencer-turned-MEP Alvise Pérez as the clearest example of this trend in action. Pérez built his campaign entirely on personal grievance, asking followers not "What kind of country do we want?" but "What is the system taking from you?" The result — 800,000 votes — came without a single policy debate or traditional ad.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023 shows that news consumption is now largely algorithmic. People see content that matches their personal worries and lifestyle. This creates what researchers call a "filter bubble" — a loop that makes the individual's own life feel like the only real politics, and everything else feel distant and irrelevant.
Why This Makes Big Problems Almost Impossible to Fix
Cañete's sharpest warning is about policy paralysis. Take climate change. A carbon tax costs drivers more money today. The benefit — a livable planet in 50 years — is real but distant. The consumer-citizen, focused on this month's fuel bill, votes against it every time. "The personal has not only become political," Cañete writes. "It has devoured the political."
Sociologist Belén Barreiro, cited by El Periódico de Aragón, calls this "fragmented anxiety." With war in Ukraine, AI disruption, and a housing crisis all hitting at once, people feel out of control. Asking "How does it affect me?" is a defense mechanism — a way to shrink an overwhelming world down to something manageable. The danger, Cañete argues, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: less collective investment leads to worse public services, which confirms the belief that the system was never working for you anyway.
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