Pedro Sánchez has covered an electoral campaign based on a million-dollar raffle aimed at specific niches of voters in an exercise in clientelist politics that he has not even bothered to put on makeup. He has committed spending items as a desperate resource. It is true that experience shows that the electoral promises of the ruling left have as short legs as lies and that a good part of the Sanchista offers were reheated dishes served by propaganda whose actual and practical execution has been a dream bordering on a mirage. Anyone could conclude that the economic joys of the president reflected an optimal and healthy state of the treasury and the state treasury. The opposite would be the conduct of an irresponsible person in a flight forward or, worse still, to nowhere. Sánchez has dressed his social narrative with a triumphant and euphoric speech about the balance of his economic policy, with the miraculous balance of having achieved the perfect balance with a kind of squaring the circle without loose ends.
Reality, of course, has never spoiled the headline. But he is there. Spain is an economy in serious difficulties, sustained these years by an enormous monetary impulse, negative rates and the manna of European funds, in addition to having registered record incomes due to the massive increase in taxes and the lucrative hit on account of inflation by refusing to deflate taxation to the rise in the CPI. These decisions have not been innocuous, but have made us the State with the highest increase in public debt in the period 2019-2022, as well as one of the five with the worst public deficit in the European Union. There are those who downplay the scope of this crazy excess of red numbers – its authors on the left and other accomplices – but runaway debt is always a stone against prosperity and well-being and a suffocating yoke for families and companies.
While Sánchez looks the other way and does not get off his particular kermés of the bills that others will pay, Brussels seems aware of the risks of not putting a stop to policies without rigor such as those of the Spanish left and has stated this in the so-called Package de Primavera that has evaluated the reform plan of the Government. At the moment, he has demanded an adjustment of 9,400 million from Sánchez in 2024 and has questioned whether the deficit for next year falls below 3% as Moncloa has predicted. It is time to turn off the aid tap for the pandemic and the energy crisis and austerity and orthodoxy are coming because the risk of a collapse is not less. Unemployed leaders and affected by a colossal indebtedness, the cost of which is already almost 7% of the Budget, it seems impossible to us that the executing hand of this chaos could be the one to amend it. Sánchez and Podemos have impoverished the Spanish by 16%. It is the dramatic summary of his service sheet.