Borja Semper y Eduardo Madina: Buenos vs. Listillos

Borja Semper and Eduardo Madina in Close & Personal, a three-way conversation that wasn't about politics, although it inevitably touched on it. It was about something earlier, about what happens to you when you grow up in a place where violence plays an unavoidable role and having ideas can cost you your life. Two parallel paths from the Basque Country: one in the People's Party (PP), the other in the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). They met at a summer camp when they were 13, lost touch, reconnected under the balcony in Ermua during the kidnapping of Miguel Ángel Blanco, and ended up as next-door neighbors in Madrid just before the lockdown. Borja comes from Irun, from an aspirational middle-class family: his father was an office worker, his mother a homemaker; no one had a university degree. He was drawn to politics not by ideology but by the figure of Gregorio Ordóñez, who practiced a new kind of politics before the term even existed, and who was assassinated by ETA. Eduardo comes from Bilbao, from a happy childhood he remembers within a close-knit family island, surrounded by a world tearing itself apart: unemployment, terrorism, a society emerging from a dictatorship and entering an uncertain democracy. We talked about what it meant to be part of the front line of civic resistance against ETA, the personal price that was paid, and that undeniable democratic victory that, nevertheless, we never fully recognized. "We won," says Borja, "but we didn't know how to win." Spaces of ambiguity remain, where some can argue that they lost and others that the other side won. And the balance between memory and forgetting remains unresolved. The conversation then opens up to the world that awaits us. Eduardo speaks of the boundaries of time, those lines that mark a before and after, lines that many generations traverse without ever crossing, and of how we are crossing a double boundary: the technological revolution of AI and a geopolitical transition that calls into question the order built since 1945. Fukuyama's theses on the end of history and Przeworski's on efficient markets and democratic consolidation are outdated. China is developing an alternative vision of the world and expanding it. Forty-five percent of the world's population is represented at summits where a non-Western value system is being defended. Borja offers an optimistic counterpoint: Europe has an opportunity, but it cannot be merely the referee if it lacks players on the field. European values—heirs to the Enlightenment, humanism, and reason—deserve to be defended, even though doing so is almost countercultural today. And there is talent, industry, and capacity for Europe to be more than just a moral beacon. And then comes the personal. Peter Thiel's contrarian question (something you strongly believe in that most people disagree with) elicited two responses that stayed with you: Edu said it's better to be good than to be clever, and that the pronoun "we" is cooler than "I." Borja, drawing on his experience with an illness that shortens your lifespan and forces you to see things differently, explained that what he felt wasn't fear of death, but a terrible sadness at ceasing to live. And that all those clichés we dismiss—seize the moment, open the expensive bottle, give the kiss—turn out to be true. Every single one. We ended up talking about legacy, what they tell their children, and some advice for anyone who's 25 and wants to change the world: choose a life with meaning. The mark you leave doesn't have to be Mandela's. It can be something close to home.