By Muriel Pilkington. The local voice
‘En boca cerrada no entran moscas’ is an old Spanish adage meaning that if you keep your mouth closed you won't ever have to eat your words.
Apparently prime minister Zapatero and his ministers are not acquainted with this saying. The Partido Popular has posted a video on its website featuring statements by Zapatero and some of his minister which make them look like liars or fools who should have kept their mouths shut.
The video is all about unemployment, the Socialists’ Achilles heel in the upcoming elections. As you probably all know, unemployment now stands at 4, 910,200 – just 89,800 away from the dreaded five million mark. According to government figures, around a quarter of a million people lost their jobs in the first three months of this year. If this trend continues, unemployment will top 5,000,000 by the end of June if not earlier, something economy minister Elena Salgado said only last week “would never happen”.
So – what did Zapatero say in October 2007 when unemployment stood at just under two million? He was going to create two million more jobs in 2008. By August 2008, when unemployment was heading for three million, he was promising full employment within a year, a promise he repeated in February 2009, when the three million mark had already been passed. So what did he say in May 2010 – that he’d never promised full employment.
As for the state of the economy, it was in the Champions League, he said in 2008. He’d finally admitted there was a crisis – the “C” word he banned in the run up to the March 2008 general election. By 2009, the economy had “never been stronger” and since May last year he’s been swearing Spain won’t need an EU bail-out thanks to the cuts he made – after the EU leaned on him. Cuts or else, was the message, and Angela Merkel made it plain she wouldn’t support a bail-out for Spain, which would cost more than the bail-outs for Greece, Ireland and Portugal put together.
I was fairly confident Spain wouldn’t need a bail-out but I’m not so sure now. After so many lies, U-turns and declarations that turned out to have been based on sheer optimism – lies - rather than on real facts and figures, nobody trusts him any more. This wouldn’t matter if it were just the Spanish voters who didn’t trust him – it’s the financial institutions and governments willing to back Spain with investments and low-interest rate loans that we have to worry about. Spain simply can’t afford to have Zapatero at the helm until March next year.
However, the local and regional elections may take care of that. If the Socialists do as badly as all the polls are indicating – with the elections less than three weeks away – Zapatero may be forced to bring the general election forward. You can say what you like about the Partido Popular but Mariano Rajoy and his gang are capable of doing what Jose Maria Aznar had to do - clean up after a Socialist government. Zapatero himself admits he inherited a robust economy from Aznar – it’s a pity he couldn’t keep it that way.
Same old song
Once again, the Socialists are trotting out the spectre of the “extreme right” in an attempt to stop people from voting for the PP. Writing about what she calls “the habitual Doberman campaign”, columnist Edurne Uriarte points out that a poll published recently by the pro-government newspaper El Pais only mentions two parties that could be described as extreme which would win seats in the local and regional elections – and they’re both left wing. Just over 5 per cent of those questioned said they would vote for Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left) which is dominated by the Communist Party. Its main aim is to get rid of the monarchy and bring in the Third Republic. A smaller number – all of them Catalans – said they would vote for ERC, the Catalan Republican Left Party, whose only aim is to separate Catalonia from Spain. The only extreme right-wing party that could take part in the elections, the Falange, doesn’t even get a mention.
The Socialists can’t really believe opposition leader Mariano Rajoy is the reincarnation of Hitler, Franco and the devil all rolled into one, so why are they trying to convince the voters that he is. The Socialists must have very short memories. The voters didn’t believe them in 1996, when they likened Jose Maria Aznar to a Doberman – they went ahead and voted for him anyway. Maybe the Spaniards like Dobermans.
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