Monday, May 18, 2020 - 09:17 Carmen Gomez

In Spain at present there is great discontent. It appears that their President Pedro Sanchez, despite his liaisons via video conference with the different autonomous regions and their respective authorities, there is little accord to be found amongst them. The Spanish Congress grows more and more hostile and the main opposition parties like the PP or Vox, instead of trying to work together with his party for the good of Spain, are hell bent on trashing everything he does.

At the same time business owners are up in arms because they say that his ideas are neither practical nor workable and that they are expected to open their doors, without having received a penny of what was promised them. If anyone expected that Spain would get its act together and tries to energise the country; and get it back to some sort of normality, the panorama is looking bleak. Curiously it has been said that if you have a political culture in which there’s a relative support and trust in the government, you’ve already got a head start. This is not the case with Spain.

Rich and Poor

Whilst Spain is forever claiming and insisting that they have to be one of the powers to be at the top table beside the big boys at the EU, when times are tough, as they are now, they don’t mind being included amongst the poorer ones asking for financial help.

Nadia Calviño, Spain’s economy minister, told the Financial Times that the government is likely to give up on trying passing a budget for 2020. Spain’s minority administration knows full well that it will not progress at present on such a key domestic problem; so instead, it is intent on trying to convince the EU; its benefactor; to finance a response to the pandemic, which will address their requirements without pushing them further into debt; with a type of debt -financed grant, rather than a loan.

Spain since day one, has always been one of the EU`s major beneficiary’s, with fifty percent of its public works having been financed by the EU. Yet despite the millions of Euros of aid which have been flitted away, poverty in Spain is widespread. In 2015 I spoke of how there were hopes for change in Spain’s political climate. I spoke of inequalities between the rich and the poor which had dragged from the year before, placing the country on a black list with evictions continuing to be the order of the day. The UN reporter Philip Alston on his two weeks visit to Spain some time back, said that it had left him surprised to see for himself the extreme poverty he had encountered.