Princess Leonor appeals to youth disillusionment and claims hope in Oviedo with family memories and nods to Felipe VI: "The wind is rising... We must try to live!"

Princess Leonor has placed the discomfort of young people at the center of her speech in Oviedo and has admitted the disillusionment, the lack of expectations and the difficulty to imagine a future marked by employment and housing.

The heir to the throne did so during the awards ceremony of the Princess of Asturias Awards, at the Campoamor Theater, where she combined that diagnosis with an explicit call for hope and confidence in times of uncertainty.

A direct diagnosis of her generation's frustration

Leonor has recovered a reference to the first year of the awards, in 1981, to link that message of hope with the doubts that, she has said, young people face today. She did so by recalling the words that José Ortega Spottorno read on behalf of María Zambrano, then in exile, before today's King Felipe VI, who was still a child.

The princess has assured that she wanted to think about that legacy to answer the questions her generation asks itself. She has spoken of "vertigo and illusion" and has acknowledged that young people wonder how to maintain enthusiasm in a context of "deep social disenchantment", inequalities, conflicts, populisms, technological wars and a life increasingly conditioned by social networks and the cost of living.

She did not stop at a generic formulation: she also alluded to the "lack of expectations" and the feeling that it is difficult to plan a life, find a stable job or access a home, an issue that in recent weeks has fueled mobilizations and encampments in different cities of Spain.

Faced with this panorama, the princess has said that she did not want to place herself in naive optimism or in dramatism. She has defended, instead, that her message should be sincere and that the answer lies in looking at what the award winners have achieved and in maintaining confidence.

Praise for the award winners and defense of what still makes sense

"Does it make sense to come to Oviedo every year?" she asked herself and answered yes, because the recognized trajectories help sustain that confidence. Then, she linked that idea with a new appeal to hope, quoting Václav Havel and recalling that it does not consist of believing that everything will turn out well, but in assuming that there are things that deserve to be defended no matter what.

She also evoked a verse by Paul Valéry, recovered by Hayao Miyazaki, to close an intervention in which she mentioned Studio Ghibli, awarded in Communication. "The wind rises... We must try to live!" she said at the end of her speech.

In her review of the award winners, Leonor dedicated words to Timothy Garton Ash, whom she defined as the "most European Briton", and recommended reading Julian Barnes, whose work, she said, can provoke laughter, tears, collapse or enthusiasm. About Barnes she added that no artificial intelligence can reproduce the emotion generated by his literature.

She has also highlighted Patti Smith, Lionel Messi, Christina Koch, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and researchers David Klenerman, Shankar Balasubramanian, and Pascal Mayer. In each case, she has emphasized the usefulness of their work, collaboration, or the value of authenticity over technological perfection.

The princess's more personal side

The speech also made room for the princess's more personal and spontaneous side. Leonor included a nod to her father, Felipe VI's age, and shared a family anecdote about her sister, Infanta Sofía, when she was barely two years old and went to the cinema. These details added a more personal tone to a speech focused on youth disillusionment and the need to maintain hope.

The ceremony thus concluded a day in which Leonor, for the third consecutive year, delivered the eulogy for the award winners in the eight categories and, for the first time alone, received the laureates at the Hotel de la Reconquista, before the official ceremony at the Campoamor.