Ursula von der Leyen

Rue de la Loi 200 / Wetstraat 200

1040 Belgium

Vigo, May 9, 2025

Dear President:

My name is Xurxo. I am an ordinary citizen, an ordinary European. I am writing this letter because I can’t take it anymore. The current state of the world frightens me. Worse, it gives me despair. I know this is just a piece of paper with little chance of reaching its destination and hardly any chance of promoting real change, but I want to think that the voice of anonymous people still matters.

Today is Europe Day and surely many anonymous people will take to the streets in its defense. Europe. What a beautiful ideal. What a complex project. There are many of us who defended and defend its necessity. Its liberal democracy, its defense of fundamental rights, its ethnic and religious plurality. All values as necessary as they are threatened, if not absent.

Precisely as a European, I am helpless, astonished and even ashamed of the latest events that are defining our world. Horrified by the lack of clear and forceful answers against the genocide being committed in Gaza. Frustrated by the closed-mindedness of minds that proclaim more borders and less freedom, by the treatment given to refugees, migrants, LGTBIQ+ people and, in general, to all those who find themselves in situations of vulnerability.

In 2004, we created the Alba Torres Carrera Foundation in order to preserve the memory of our daughter Alba by helping children and young people at risk of exclusion. When did Europe and our Foundation cross paths? Right now. We have activated a campaign with Save the Children to help children living in emergency situations: in Ukraine, in Gaza – where more than 17,800 children have died and 1.1 million face malnutrition – in Sudan and in so many places where thousands of minors have to flee their homes because of war.

The campaign is called #Beland. A word that reminds us that all human beings are united in our need to be rooted to life and to the earth. That from birth, we all have the right to be and to be. Beland is also a movement of vindication of the anonymous people. We cannot forget that Europe is made up of all of us. And we do not give up. But it does not arrive. Unfortunately, the horror is so great that there will be children, like the Palestinians, who cannot even receive our help.

On Europe Day, appealing to our historical responsibility as a peace project and in defense of human rights, we urge the European Commission to promote concrete measures to protect children in conflict zones and to strengthen the legal channels for channeling humanitarian aid.

We need our institutions and our rulers to join us. If we do not face the horror with firmness and serenity we will be losing our way, and our raison d’être as a society and as citizens. Not only of Europe, but of the whole world.

Thank you very much for your attention,

Xurxo Torres