🇪🇸 Spain

Spain's official youth unemployment of 23.4% is a masterpiece of statistical cope — it counts only those who stayed behind to be counted. Since 2008, over 500,000 young Spaniards (the most educated, most mobile, most AI-adaptable cohort) have emigrated, shrinking the denominator and making the rate look better than reality. Median age of 45.5 and one of the EU's lowest fertility rates mean the dependency ratio is on autopilot to 40%+ by 2035. The 'recovery' Sánchez boasts about is largely a demographic ghost story: a country whose best young people are WhatsApping from Berlin, London, and Amsterdam.

Spain's AI strategy is the 'Spain Digital 2026' agenda and the EU recovery fund (Next Generation EU) trickle, both of which are mostly aspirational PowerPoints. There is no serious retraining infrastructure for the hundreds of thousands of young NEETs, no industrial policy targeting AI exposure in tourism/banking/public administration, and no acknowledgment that tourism's white-collar layer (travel agents, tour operators, marketing) faces the same AI displacement as everywhere else. The political class is too busy surviving investiture votes to govern.