The king laments the “immense and irreparable” damage of a war that threatens “our present and our future”. The solemn ceremony returns to normal with more than a thousand guests without restrictions or masks
The solemn delivery ceremony of the Princess of Asturias Awards this Friday restored its full normalcy and all its splendor. There were no masks or restrictions and he resumed his long thousand guests, for whom King Felipe VI mourned the war in Ukraine. It deplored the threats looming over the European Union as a result of the many crises it faces and called for the restoration of the peace that the EU has made possible. It was the 42nd edition of the prizes organized by the Campoamor Theater in Oviedo, and the fourth in which the Princess of Asturias, Leonor de Borbón, presented the prizes in the company of her mother, Queen Letizia, her grandmother, Queen Sofía Emérita, and his sister the Infanta Sofia.
“The world economic situation, energy security or environmental crisis are huge challenges to which a war in Europe is added,” said Don Felipe after examining the merits of the winners. A war that lasted eight ‘endless’ months and caused ‘immense and irreparable damage’. “It brings with it the terrible memory and the heavy shadow of other times, which threatens our present and our future,” said the king. “It destroys lives, future projects, illusions and hopes, feelings and personal emotions,” lamented the monarch, referring to the “horror that has returned in the 21st century in Europe, which continues in other parts of the world and which always represents a great failure for humanity.
Everything that enriches us as human beings is a “victim of the conflict”, although the king believes that “war will never destroy the culture or the values it represents, nor the freedom and dignity of the human being”. Values “which are the essence of these Awards and which represent Europe”, said Don Felipe. He recalled that the origin of the EU “was the search for a permanent peace after the devastation caused by the two great world wars”. And that Schuman’s idea of a united Europe in peace “is still fully valid”. «We must persevere to consolidate this project, which has united us so much and continues to unite us. A project of progress, freedom, justice, respect, human rights, democratic principles; who deserves our loyalty and all our commitment at one of the most crucial moments in its recent history,” said Felipe VI in a speech that concluded with an urgent request to his eldest daughter and the young people of his generation to look at themselves in the mirror of the winners.
“The Putin regime’s war against Ukraine is against the whole democratic world and threatens the essential values of democracy: freedom and truth that we defend from ‘Gazeta Wyborcza'” agreed with Don Felipe, the founder and director of this newspaper , the journalist Pool Adam Michnik, winner of the Communication and Humanities Prize. Values ”threatened again by the Putin regime’s criminal aggression against Ukraine.”
Michnik was injured by the looting, rapes, torture and murders “perpetrated by Putin’s army”, but warned that “Putin is not Russia”. He asked the Russians who were against war barbarism to demonstrate openly. «They are the ones who defend Russia’s honor, as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn did; as Thomas Mann defended Germany’s honor during the years of the Nazi apocalypse,” he said. “This is an evil war unleashed by evil men who, possessed by the madness of Great Russian imperialism, remind us today of what men poisoned by the mixture of Nazism and Bolshevism, and by their cruelty and anarchy, are capable,” Michnik said in a speech that ended by quoting Cervantes and Unamuno and setting Spain “as a model for coming out of the come”.
With poise and determination, the Princess of Asturias praised the winners, showing that she knew their merits, especially Michnik’s “responsible and rigorous” journalism. He acknowledged that the winners’ work helps him “better understand the world around us.” “We young people are aware that the current situation is not easy, that the world has changed and continues to change, and that the best way to make progress is to maintain the enthusiasm to learn, to equip ourselves with responsibility. and the ability to exert effort, to learn from who knows, from those who do their thing impeccably, often in silence,” the heiress told the crown. That’s why “listening to, admiring and acknowledging the excellence of our winners makes us feel that things can always change for the better,” he concluded.
The playwright Juan Mayorga, (prize for letters), the archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, (social sciences), and the social entrepreneur Ellen MacArthur, (international collaboration), delivered their speeches earlier in a theater with 1,313 occupied seats and in front of the other winners : Carmen Linares and María Pagés, (Arts) -who sang and danced to Juan Ramón Jiménez-, Shigeru Ban, (Concordia), and Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis, (Scientific and Technical Research) along with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, who were unable to travel on medical advice.
Leonor de Borbón arrived in Spain on Thursday from Cardiff, Wales, where she is in her second year of secondary school at Atlantic College, a center affiliated with the educational organization UWC (Colegios el mundo Unidos). She has not appeared in public since August 10, when she walked through the center of Palma de Mallorca with her sister and her parents. He had not returned to Spain since the beginning of the school year and the presence of the crown heiress was possible because the awarding ceremony coincided with his academic holidays. A break to celebrate your 17th birthday with your family on October 31. Next year, when she’s about to come of age, will probably be the last time she’ll be joined by the Kings. As happened to his father, who became the sole protagonist of the birthing ceremony when he turned 18.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
