If it wasn’t so incredibly tragic for the country its affecting, Spain, you’d have to laugh at Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s efforts to continue to justify his party’s austerity measures in his end-0f-year address yesterday. Austerity measures that the majority of people in Spain can see are simply not working.Rajoy even asked Spaniards for their “comprehension and solidarity” while his party continues to push their failed vision of austerity down the throats of everyone in Spain — a bold move considering the majority of Spaniards no longer support him.
With less than 25 percent of Spaniards now supporting him, and 25 percent of Spaniards still unemployed (50 percent of those under the age of 28), Rajoy even had the audacity to say that, without his center-right Popular Party reforms, the situation in Spain would be even worse. “Intolerable” is what he said. That there is no evidence for that, and that the reverse is likely true, is something he simply ignored.
Rajoy also told reporters attending his year-end address at his La Moncloa residence yesterday that he and his party had no plans to change the deficit objectives they have given to each of Spain’s regions no matter how much the regions beg. With almost every region stating they cannot function or survive with these extreme measures in place and all the financial cuts to regional services Rajoy has requested, all Rajoy had to say to that was……..nothing.
All we can say at Seriously Spain is let’s hope 2013 brings Spain something better, and someone better than Mariano Rajoy.
A prime minister who, in the year he has been in office, has done nothing but push Spain further into the financial abyss it’s careening down. After all, even though Rajoy seemed to think all it would take was a conservative government in power in the country for world markets to have more confidence in Spain, confidence they had supposedly lost under the former socialist government, the reality is it takes much more than that.
It takes a prime minister who understands basic economic facts and realities, and who understands that austerity simply doesn’t work and hasn’t worked anywhere. It takes a prime minister that listens to others. And it takes a prime minister that refuses to be bullied by Germany’s Angela Merkel and her ilk.
Mariano Rajoy is not that man, and his end-of-the-year address yesterday proved it.