The decor is part of the scene. Against a grey wall, without much in the way of decoration, the workmen at La Moncloa (the Spanish premier’s official residence) set up a large table; a dark base in tune with the current economic situation. Around the large black table sit the most successful businessmen in Spain, called together urgently by the man who arrived in the post of prime minister promising the country’s youth that he would not fail them and that power would not change him. In front of dozens of photographers and television cameras, Zapatero had a defeated look, with bags under his eyes. It was not only because of the poll ratings of his management of a severe crisis, but also for the confirmation that even among the rank and file of his party, the PSOE (Socialists), they were starting to look beyond him, as if they were looking at the traitor in the team. Flanked by the two heavyweights in his government, the now candidate to succeed him as premier, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, and the Minister of Economy, Elena Salgado, he tried to face up to the questions about new adjustments to fix a situation that has left five million people unemployed on the country’s streets. Zapatero tried hard to cover up his exhaustion after seven years of power that is now fading away. “He had the look of an anguished person, the stamp of someone who has decided to put his destiny in the hands of those who never helped him. He is living an agonizing and very hard time,” says an historic Socialist militant from the city of Leon who has known the still prime minister of Spain since his days of studying law. “He doesn’t surrender easily in the face of adversity, and he’s not lying when he calls for collaboration from all the employers and unions, and especially from a (main)
4 8 B A BY L O N M A G A Z I N E
The breath of fresh air of freedom and tolerance that Zapatero brought with him on his arrival at La Moncloa was coming back to him, every day thicker and less breathable. The Spanish Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shows an economy that grew by 3.3% in 2004 falling to minus 0.1% in 2010, a cataclysm of historic proportions.
opposition party that is not playing fair,” he adds, before declining to give his name. But the out for the count Zapatero, as the French daily ‘Le Monde’ called him in a recent leader article, has not been able to revitalize the Spanish financial system. In reality, his political influence started to wane before the arrival of the economic swell. Firstly, in transmitting a previously hidden sense of insecurity in matters such as the speculation in the property market, or the lack of an answer to the cases of internal corruption in his party. However, the sinking speeded up as he showed a clear incapacity to at least defend the social democratic option in the face of the suffocating pressure of the money markets on the Spanish economy. “He caused much disillusion in the PSOE for the little resistance he put up to the neo-liberal recipes of reducing social spending and cutting back on public investment, the banners of our party”, says this old friend of the prime minister. At the end of the day, many feel that Zapatero has failed them. Perhaps that is because, despite his original promise, power has changed him. Or perhaps it was one thing to fly in the face of Emperor Bush, withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, and of Pope John Paul II, by pushing for gay marriages, but quite another to stand up to the IMF and the risk of international intervention in the national economy. A few weeks back, in an eloquent analysis, the former Director General of International Information to the premier (between 2004 and 2006), Javier Valenzuela, pointed to Zapatero as only “liking to be photographed in the company of businessmen and bankers, and opening up a gap in the meetings of conservative politicians and international financial predators like DSK (Dominique Strauss-Kahn)”. His inside critics accuse him of turning a deaf ear to the lessons in social democratic economy that an expert recommended to him during the time in which the winds of the national economy were blowing in the right direction “Neither did he face up to a fiscal reform that would have meant the working and middle classes paying a bit less and the multimillionaires a bit more, nor did he push for a public bank and energy company to control the bursting of the property bubble”, says Valenzuela. The breath of fresh air of freedom and tolerance that Zapatero brought with him on his arrival at La Moncloa was coming back to him, every day thicker and less breathable. The Spanish Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shows an economy that grew by 3.3% in 2004 falling to minus 0.1% in 2010, a cataclysm of historic proportions.