• Article Tools
• Print
• RSS

Spain's Turmoil

by Alejandro Bermudez 

Spain is in the midst of major economic turmoil. Its economy is too small for the current crisis of the euro not to exact a heavy toll on its population and too big for a bailout like the one Greece is receiving.

Last Sunday, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that the government would hold firm on spending cuts that would mean the largest elimination of social benefits since the 1936 Civil War. These include cutting government salaries and retirees’ benefits, raising the retirement age, hiking taxes and eliminating all child benefits in a country with the lowest birth rate in Europe.

Zapatero himself has admitted that these policies, so unpopular that his own party-controlled unions have threatened a massive strike, could mean his political demise after six unexpected years in power. After all, he was only elected three days after the 2004 terrorist attacks on Madrid’s commuter train system that left nearly 200 dead, which resulted in his Socialist party promising to pull Spain out of the Iraq war.

Zapatero kept his promise of pulling Spain’s army out of Iraq, but his government, riding on an unprecedented economic windfall created by the opposing party, focused exclusively on social and moral issues.

Thus, in five years, the razor-thin Socialist majority in Congress passed laws that made divorce easier to obtain, legalized gay marriage and homosexual adoption, expanded the availability of abortion beyond any other European country and reduced financial support for families.

Although the opposition to such measures provoked the largest street demonstrations ever seen in Spain, the majority of Spaniards preferred to carry on with the secularist, happy-spending trend fueled by Spain’s real estate bubble.

But in late 2008, with the American housing market in a free fall, the Spanish market followed suit. Since then, eight of every 10 jobs lost in Europe have come from Spain, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Last Saturday, the Bank of Spain – the equivalent to the Federal Reserve – took control of “CajaSur,” a large savings bank that had $16.36 billion of bad housing loans outstanding.

Despite Socialist analysts predicting that Zapatero’s policies may save Spain’s economy and bring him recognition and popularity down the road, currently 60 percent of Spaniards oppose the government and 58 percent want early elections, something Spain’s constitution allows for.

Still, the Spanish pro-life and family forces have no big expectations for what would happen in the case of an electoral victory for the Partido Popular (People’s Party) in opposition to Zapatero’s government. Eduardo Hertfelder, president of Spanish Institute for Family Policies – one of the major players in the cultural opposition to the Socialists – recently told a news agency that the possible political switch to the Populares “would mostly stop the anti-life and anti-family trend, but hardly reverse it.”

Yet Hertfelder believes that stopping the trend is no small accomplishment, considering that in the last five years the government has accomplished more cultural and moral changes than in the 30 previous years of Spanish democracy post-Franco.

Some policies, like the recently passed abortion law that allows 16-year-olds to abort their children without parental consent, could be reversed because they were opposed by the majority of Spaniards.

But most of the other laws, Hertfelder believes, would not be reversed “simply because the process of secularization has convinced Spaniards that values are subjective, and that they have no place in the public square.”

And that includes many members of the Partido Popular, who despite seeing pro-life and pro-family Catholics as a coveted piece of the electoral pie, are hardly on the same cultural and moral page.

This has created an internal debate within the movement. Some pro-lifers believe that a new party should be supported. Thus, there is the recent creation of Alternativa Española (Spanish Alternative), a pro-life, pro-family party that has been successful in mobilizing activists via social networking, but has proven too small to put representatives in Congress.

Others are betting instead on taking back the soul of the Partido Popular.  

Hertfelder and several others believe that, whatever the political solution, reviving the soul of the party will not come until a cultural change is accomplished.

“I don’t believe Spain’s Catholic soul has been lost forever,” Hertfelder recently said. “The history of Catholicism in Spain has been marked by sharp extremes, and I think the pendulum is swinging back.”

Politics in Spain, no matter how important, will mostly reflect – rather than produce – such a swing.

---

(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)