Una... jeżeli zgodzisz się to podsumowaniem tego wątku może być bardzo ciekawy artykuł z The Financial Times autorstwa Leslie Crawford:
Spain inherits wider liberties as well as trouble for the economy
An air of improvisation, of transience, has suffused José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government in Spain since his unexpected general election victory four years ago in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombings.
That event, in which 191 people died (and for which 21 Islamist militants were last year convicted), has cast a long shadow over Spanish politics. The conservative Popular party never accepted its defeat, which it blamed on the terror attack. As a result, Spaniards hope the election on Sunday will end one of the most bitterly divisive periods since the restoration of democracy 30 years ago.
The two main parties are preaching reconciliation. Mariano Rajoy of the Popular party says he will seek bipartisan accords on all matters of state – agreements he has denied Mr Zapatero during Mr Rajoy’s four years as leader of the opposition.
If the Socialists are re-elected on Sunday, as opinion polls suggest, political analysts say Mr Zapatero’s authority would be enhanced – but the improvisation would have to stop. Tasks such as tackling a slowing economy and the integration of almost 5m immigrants who flocked there when it was booming can no longer be postponed.
“The big question in these elections is whether Zapatero continues for another four years and therefore establishes some kind of stability, which has been lacking, or whether his four years in office were a hiccup – an anomaly,” says Charles Powell, a historian at the University of San Pablo CEU in Madrid.
When Mr Zapatero (pictured right) took office in 2004 aged 43, he had no experience in government. He was lucky to have two experienced deputies: Pedro Solbes, doing a second stint as finance minister; and María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, in charge of social policy. The two deputy prime ministers helped anchor Mr Zapatero’s sometimes woolly ideas on civil rights and devolution. Mr Solbes was the gatekeeper for public finances, which are in surplus after 14 years of uninterrupted economic growth.
But Mr Zapatero was wilful and impulsive, and often ignored the advice of elder statesmen. His first act was to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq – a decision that earned him the lasting animosity of the US administration of George W. Bush. He then made peace overtures to Eta, the Basque terrorist group, which were rebuffed.
Mr Zapatero’s timing has often been disastrous. His end-of-year speech in 2006 promised that a peace deal with Eta was at hand. On New Year’s eve, the Basque terrorists bombed Madrid’s international airport, killing two.
His predictions for the economy have also been off-kilter – some say deliberately so. Last September he declared Spain had joined “the Champions League of world economies”, just as the property boom that had driven growth collapsed. In January Mr Zapatero insisted there had been “no change in the economic cycle”. That month unemployment registered its steepest rise in 10 years.
These episodes have caused even some supporters to wonder whether he had succumbed to the “Moncloa syndrome” – an affliction characterised by delusions of grandeur and a loss of touch with reality that is said to affect leaders who occupy the prime minister’s residence, the Moncloa palace.
Analysts say Mr Zapatero’s over-optimistic assessment of the economy has been driven by the need to maintain confidence in his government as the election approached. Prof Powell says the difficulty faced by both parties is about how to manage expectations after a prolonged period of prosperity. The irony, he adds, is that there are few differences in their economic programmes even though the state of the economy has been the main battleground of the campaign.
Both Mr Zapatero and Mr Rajoy promise big tax cuts to boost consumption. Mr Zapatero is also pledging to speed up a 16-year, €250bn ($384bn, L191bn) public works programme to absorb unemployed construction workers and wants to build high-speed railways all over Spain. Mr Rajoy says he will revive a plan – shelved by the Socialists when they came to power – to take water from the Ebro river in the north to the parched Mediterranean provinces. When the Ebro plan was mooted eight years ago, it was billed as the largest infrastructure project ever attempted in the European Union.
There are greater differences over immigration. “Spain has received more immigrants than any other country in the world, apart from the US, and this is a totally new phenomenon for the country,” says Prof Powell. “The fear is that many immigrants will be out of a job soon – 400,000 already are. The government hopes these people can be recycled into other more productive sectors of the economy. But at this stage we don’t really know what impact large numbers of unemployed immigrants will have on Spanish society – or what social tensions will arise if unemployment among Spaniards also rises.”
Mr Zapatero says immigration has been good for Spain. He emphasises that most immigrants are working and paying for the pensions of 1m Spaniards through contributions to the social security system. Mr Rajoy has taken a much tougher line. He wants to expel immigrants who become unemployed.
Supporters insist Mr Zapatero has learnt from his mistakes. “The Zapatero that is standing for re-election is better prepared, more solid and more intelligible than the man who was elected four years’ ago,” Juan Luís Cebrían, chief executive of Prisa, Spain’s largest media group, wrote in the daily El País.
Josep Ramoneda, a philosopher and director of the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, agrees that Mr Zapatero is more experienced. “But he has had tremendous difficulty in leading controversial reforms.” Some of these, such as enhanced self-government for some of Spain’s regions, have estranged Catalonia’s Socialists from the Socialists who govern in Madrid.
Mr Zapatero has been most successful in extending civil liberties. Gay Spaniards can now marry, wife-battering is a criminal offence and there are new social benefits for families who look after the handicapped or elderly at home.
But he has evaded wider questions: the limits of regional power, how to wean the economy from its dependence on construction, how to manage the integration of immigrants. On these big issues, Mr Zapatero remains an enigma.
Leslie Crawford