Fernando González Urbaneja| If we have to choose the highlights of Pedro Sánchez’s leadership trajectory, one of them would have to be the “No is No” (what part of this has not been understood?) It was his entry through the big door of political decisions by not enabling a new government after the first elections of 2016 with a tactical abstention, which mathematically blocked the forming of a parliamentary majority…
Jakob Suwalski and Giulia Branz (Scope Ratings) | Budget constraints faced by the autonomous regions make policy adjustments and new investments difficult. By the end of 2022, none of the regions met the 13% debt-to-GDP threshold in their fiscal framework, while the aggregate fiscal deficit worsened to 1.1% of GDP from 0.1% in 2021, contrasting with the reduction in the deficit of the general government, i.e. the central government plus…
Jakob Suwalski (Scope Ratings) | Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to call early elections is potentially advantageous for Spain’s economic outlook insofar as it should prevent the government from losing six months of valuable time to determine long-term policy goals, even if it means forming a coalition or minority government. This timeframe allows for reforms to be implemented and the country’s fiscal and economic challenges to be addressed. However, the…
Fernando González Urbaneja | Quite a few (including two national newspapers) have applied the arithmetic template of Sunday’s results to a general election with a result that would be favourable to the grand coalition of the left/nationalists, headed and sponsored by Pedro Sánchez. In this case the PP would be the most voted party with 140 deputies (with VOX in retreat below 20 seats) while the PSOE would remain as…
Fernando Gonzéz Urbaneja | The expectation of a very tough six-month election campaign weighed on Sánchez’s conscience throughout the evening after the evidence of Sunday’s results. This explains why bringing forward the elections is tactical and opportunistic (in political logic), and also why Feijóo began his speech in front of the cameras with the words: “the sooner the better”. Better for the incumbent who defends the results of November 2019,…
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that the general election will be brought forward to next July 23 after the electoral defeat suffered this Sunday by the PSOE in the regional and municipal polls. The head of the Executive has assumed this Sunday’s electoral results “in first person” and his response is that this means “submitting the popular mandate to the popular will”, as he has stated…
Sánchez’s PSOE has insisted on cordon sanitaire not only with the far-right Vox, but even with the right-wing PP, with which it has refused to agree anything, while explaining the benefits of granting amnesty to the perpetrators of the attempted coup in Catalonia, of negotiating with the heirs of ETA, and with the populists of Podemos. Something that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the electorate, even on the…
Fernando González Urbaneja| The government’s official discourse is unequivocal: Spain is doing well, the economy is doing very well. Vice-president Calviño comes out insistently with the concept of “leadership” to illustrate every decision of the government in economic and social matters. Gender parity means leadership; the Iberian exception is leadership; the growth of employment and GDP means leadership and so on and so forth. According to the government, Spain is…
The last year has seen the biggest population growth in 14 years, but it is all due to immigration. Residents with Spanish nationality have fallen by 13,000 and those born in Spain by 101,000. Spain has experienced in the last year the highest population growth in the last 14 years, with nearly 600,000 more inhabitants at the end of this first quarter than at the same time in 2022. As…
Jakob Suwalski (Scope Ratings | France and Spain have enacted pension reforms this year to put their pension systems on a sounder financial footing and boost employment, but doubts remain about their long-term sustainability and impact on the economy, given their similar demographic trends. The content of the reforms is also different. France (AA/Stable) aims to rebalance its pension system by raising the statutory retirement age from 62 to 64…