Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2011, with the PSOE (Zapatero) in government and the Partido Popular in opposition. The references to the current government and the opposition belong to that moment.
Let’s start with a few statistics. Spain is one of the countries with the weakest investment culture, just as we are near the bottom when it comes to saving. A third of Spaniards have no money put aside for emergencies, and the average Spaniard lacks financial literacy. As a result, Spaniards worry about the economy in general without knowing where the problems the country is currently going through actually come from.
This turns Spaniards into a politically manipulable “flock”. I don’t like talking about politics, because I always try to look at it from the most neutral standpoint possible, and those of you who have been following us for a while will have noticed that here we criticize whatever we think is unfair, whether it comes from the Partido Popular or from the PSOE.
Today my criticism goes to the opposition, which I see more and more trying to take Spaniards for fools. It is perfectly acceptable for them to criticize the current government’s handling of the crisis, but saying publicly that they left behind an economically stable country and that the crisis was caused by the PSOE coming to power is exploiting citizens’ lack of financial knowledge and an affront to common sense.
They left the country in wonderful shape, to the point that we broke the world record for household debt. “Families taking on debt is a sign of a healthy country” were the words of a minister during the housing bubble. The thing is, that debt has to be paid back.
Spaniards have to pay their own debt (mortgages and loans they took on beyond their means), the public debt through excessive taxes, and the debt generated by the banks, which were less debts than losses, like those of someone gambling in a casino for his own benefit, knowing that if the ball lands on black instead of red, the house (the Spanish people) will cover his losses.
Spaniards have to pay for the disaster the banks themselves caused, and for the abuses of a sector that has been rescued with public money even though its institutions make billions of euros in profits and keep up abusive practices towards consumers. It is ironic that a bank should repossess the home of someone whose finances were hit by the very bank carrying out the repossession.
In Iceland, citizens found the culprits: they refused to bail out the banks, saw their bankers pursued by the courts and forced an entire government to resign. Would we in Spain be able to find the culprits? Who should pay here for such massive, disproportionate debt?
I still strongly recommend watching the documentary “Inside Job“, which gives you the names of the people and companies responsible for the crisis. Some will be disappointed not to see Zapatero’s name anywhere, but the documentary is about those responsible for the crisis, not about manipulating political debates to win votes.
I’ll finish with a very common Spanish saying that sums up Spain before and after perfectly:
“He was in perfect health, and then he died. So he can’t have been that healthy.”
Featured image: Luis García, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
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