First, let me explain how Sr. Rajoy and the Central Government got to where they are. I cite for this purpose, a BBC article written in November 2011, just after he had won the national elections:
Critics accuse him of misleading voters into thinking he is a moderate, while harbouring a hidden agenda of economic shock therapy.
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He … was chosen by Mr Aznar as his preferred successor at the 2004 election, when the party was tipped to win a third term.
In the event, the Popular Party crashed out of office, its shock defeat blamed on the Madrid train bombings and the outgoing prime minister’s handling of the atrocity.
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Newspaper correspondents note that Mr Rajoy would not be drawn on the details of his plans for fighting the debt crisis during the 2011 election campaign.
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“If you said what you have in mind, not even your own supporters would vote for you,” his Socialist opponent, Perez Rubalcaba, jibed during a televised election debate. So are Spaniards being lulled into drastic cuts, succumbing, as France’s Le Figaro has quipped, to the “discreet charm of austerity”?
Now, knowing what he has done in the time since then; i.e., he promised he would not touch Public Health, yet he slashed it; he promised he would not touch Public Education (schools) but he slashed it; he said that he would not raise taxes, but went ahead and did it to both direct and indirect taxes; he promised to maintain retirement pensions linked to inflation and then went straight ahead and did the opposite.
This is the man, who in the opposition when the socialist government was struggling to contain the economic crisis, said, “To raise taxes is a blow that a bad leader imposes on the people.” He then did precisely that once he got into power, without so much as blushing.
When he said that he would create employment, raise pensions and revive the economy without cutting education, health or raising taxes, it was met with disbelief. When the press and other political parties asked he how he intended to do that, he refused to comment, but of course, here we are now in 2013 and we know what was really in store and why he kept tight lipped about it.
Rajoy, in short, lost the elections in 2004 for attempting to mislead the Spanish public on who was behind the Madrid Train Bombings, only to reach office later by clearly misleading the electorate again.
Don’t get me wrong, Rajoy managed to gain office mainly thanks to the disastrous and incompetent socialist government under Zapatero, which reacted too late and with too little to the looming economical crisis. Rajoy could have come clean with his plans, but although he would still have won the elections, maybe, he would certainly not have obtained a crushing majority.
So here we are now with this man saying that he and his party haven’t received kick-back money in unmarked envelopes and quite frankly nobody believes him – and can people be blamed after his track record of deceit?
Here’s the rub: when it first became known that his party was allegedly being illegally financed (The Gürtel Scandal) He backed his party treasurer, Luis Barcenas, to the hilt. Then when pressure mounted, they supposedly threw him out – the euphemism was that he had stepped aside.
Yet, when even more of Barcenas’s alleged dirty dealings came to light (he is under judicial investigation at the moment), Rajoy’s party spokeswoman claimed that Bárcenas no longer had anything to do with the PP, therefore it does not concern them, which is ridiculous because all of the reportedly crooked dealings that Bárcenas and Co were up to, were done whilst he was a conservative senator and treasurer of the national party.
It later turns out that Bárcenas still had an office in the PP headquarters in Madrid and was still being paid by them right up to the end of January this year. The red-faced explanations given to explain it away convinced nobody and the national press across the political spectrum was highly critical.
Bárcenas has declared war against the PP. Everybody is amazed by the fact that he is applying hammer blows to the PP, yet they in turn respond almost meekly, leading any observant person to suppose that their adversary has them ‘in a testicular grip.’ The opposition leader summed it up devastatingly: “Sr. Rajoy, can you continue to govern knowing that one morning Barcénas might have an attack of sincerity?”
Rajoy appears to be a man who believes that if he can ignore a problem, somebody will eventually sort it out for him, so he refuses to give explanations before parliament, where his party holds an absolute majority and can block any call for him to appear and answer questions. As far as answering questions from the press, he refuses to do so, saying beforehand that he will make a public statement but will not accept questions… and this, in a democracy?
The National Debate, which is a yearly appearance in the Parliament made by a Prime Minister to give an account of the previous year was the first time that he actually faced questioning by the opposition. He completely sidestepped the Bárcenas Scandal and did not mention his name once during his 90-minute opening speech, nor did he mention him by name during the rest of the 2-day debate.
What he did fall back to, on numerous occasions, was the ‘toxic inheritance’ left by the outgoing government. Well over a year after taking office, this excuse has worn extremely thin, yet he continues to brandish it. However, with the PSOE still limping from the disastrous election results, with a leader who is widely recognized as ‘spent,’ even within his own party, Rajoy came away from the debate as the clear winner of the two.
But the situation stands; Mariano Rajoy pushed unemployment up from just under 5 million to 6 million through stubborn austerity measures, which do not include, I might add, a serious cutting back on political posts. (Spain has double the number of politicians but half the population of Germany)
Consumer spending has dried up because so many people are out of work and those that still have a job by some miracle, are hanging onto their savings for fear of losing their jobs, yet they now have to struggle even harder because of increased taxes. There are 1.8m families – not individuals but families – where not one member of the household has an income.
There must be stimulus packages as well as cutbacks on administrative expenditure. Even the IMF is saying this. If people do not have a job, they cannot generate taxes, and if they cannot generate taxes, the government can’t function. Yet the Government thinks the solution is to raise the tax levels on those still working, forcing them into unemployment because their business or post becomes unsustainable.
This latest case in the epidemic of nationwide political corruption that assails the political class, could be the ruin of the country… and by that, I mean the destruction of democracy here. Things are in danger of bursting, as people no longer believe any of the two major parties, seeing the political class as collectively mendacious and light-fingered.
What people are beginning to fear is that if a demagogue steps out of the shadows with the Spanish Army at his back, too many people are going to cheer the tanks as they rumble down the streets.
The last time that the tanks were out in the streets – February 1981 – people avidly believed in Democracy, now just over 30 years later, they’re disgusted by it and the politicians only have themselves to blame.
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