The Christian Science Monitor reports:
The scale of this weekend’s anti-austerity protests in Spain spells political instability ahead for the country. Despite an influx of investor capital into the country’s export sector, the rest of Spain’s economy continues to lag, especially in creating employment for millions of young people.
“There’s a lot of frustration from all sides with the political establishment,” says our correspondent in Madrid. “Spain’s recovery, like much of the periphery, is a two-sided story. Some sectors are certainly benefiting, and there is growth, and there is job creation in some very specific sectors. But for broader society, there is no recovery.”
The hundreds of thousands of protesters who turned out Saturday are looking for the government to roll back deep austerity cuts in health-care, education, and the welfare state. Frustration with the rising cost of living and an unemployment problem that will take at least a decade to clear up has brought even center-right voters into the anti-austerity fold. But with fiscal targets mandated by the European Union, politicians’ hands are mostly tied, our correspondent notes.
The ruling center-right party looks increasingly weak heading into a trio of elections over the next year and a half. The ruling party hasn’t even fielded its candidate for European parliamentary elections in May, essentially throwing in the towel, our correspondent says. Then voters will head to the polls twice in 2015, first for regional elections, then a national election.
“Whoever wins is going to have a very weak majority, and they are going to need to negotiate. And regardless of how you negotiate, [the government] is just not going to have a lot of governing power. So it’s going to be hard to push through all the reforms that still need to be applied,” says our correspondent. “Even with the European elections, it’s just going to open up a lot of tension, and that’s without including external factors like Ukraine.”
Spain’s economy is driven by internal consumption, but there’s just no internal consumption.
