The 1976 Constitution has two hundred and ninety-six articles. I know this because I looked it up, which already puts me in a considerable statistical minority. Today, it reads like a love letter written by someone who no longer expected a reply.
Article 65 is, of all, the cruelest. It states, with the solemnity of someone dictating a will, that everyone has the right to housing of ‘adequate size’, in ‘conditions of hygiene and comfort’, which preserves ‘personal intimacy’ and ‘family privacy’. It is a beautiful paragraph. It has the rhythm of a wedding vow and the solidity of a mirage.
Fifty years later, ‘adequate size’ has been translated by the grammar of the market into the vernacular of misery: it is a studio flat renting for €800, a hole without light where personal privacy boils down to hearing your neighbour coughing through plasterboard walls.
Comfort is a polar fleece blanket bought on sale. Privacy is what you find an hour away by bus from where you work, in exchange for the privilege of having a roof over your head that, technically, belongs to the bank or to an investment fund.
The problem isn’t the Constitution. The problem has never been the Constitution. The problem is us: we found it much easier to celebrate a document than to fulfill it.
Tomorrow, I’ll be celebrating too. I have the utmost respect for the people who wrote that document. That generation still believed the right words could change the world.
Sometimes, even I believe it. But then I remember the letter was addressed to us.