Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012. It is news commentary: the polls for the March 2012 Andalusian election, the 25 billion euro cuts figure and the forecasts for 2012-2015 all belong to that moment.
“I know what I have to do, and I’m going to do it.” It’s a great line from Rajoy, one that might even inspire confidence, were it not that after saying it he doesn’t usually say what he’s actually going to do. And if he did say what has to be done to get out of the crisis (according to him), he certainly wouldn’t win in Andalusia. That’s a big risk, because according to the polls the PP (Rajoy’s People’s Party) would sweep Andalusia today.
Right now any citizen might think that if Zapatero was lost in his handling of the crisis, Rajoy has yet to find himself, because so far every criticism he made of the previous government has turned out to be an electoral ploy. That became clear the very day he did exactly what, months earlier, he had criticized the previous prime minister of Spain for on as many as 12 occasions: “Mr. Zapatero, raising taxes during a recession is madness, because it slows consumption.” What he forgot to add was “but let me be the one to raise them”, because that’s exactly what he ended up doing.
Zapatero’s legacy has also been much talked about. After the latest analyses of the public deficit, the biggest problem was finally found in the regional deficit, because of the heavy debt of the autonomous communities (Spain’s regional governments), and, as it happens, the most indebted regions are the ones the PP was running. We won’t go into political corruption, because in that respect it’s true that the PP and the PSOE are on a par.
The government has to make new cuts, and an initial figure of €25 billion is being discussed, not counting the money the banks need to clean up their balance sheets. How Mariano Rajoy will do it, and where he will cut €25 billion… I think we’ll find out once the result in Andalusia is known.
For now, everything points to Spain facing a long, hard recession, with the most optimistic economists predicting that 2012 and 2013 will be years of job losses and economic growth below zero. The less optimistic say there won’t be even the slightest improvement until 2015, when the country could begin a slow, gradual recovery. As for the most realistic… those of you who have been following us for a while already know the forecast and what really ought to be done.
Featured image: European People's Party, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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