Is something rotten in the state of Spain?

Spain is falling further into the abyss. As we have been arguing for the past months, the bail out of Spain should be the point of focus for now, not Greece. In order to understand the Spanish economy, one must understand the Spanish mentality, and this can’t be derived from financial researcher and their excel sheets. The Spanish bubble has burst, but still the country lives in great denial. This is the single most important factor prolonging the crisis. Meanwhile, the corruption is reaching new dimension, where the “clean” corruption of stealing money has evolved into a situation where the law is twisted. One of the better pieces on the great denial of  the imploding Spanish economy, by El Pais.

Four years into the ever-darkening tunnel of recession, growing numbers of Spaniards are losing whatever faith they may have had in their political parties and the country’s institutions. A new survey by pollsters Metroscopia shows that for 90 percent of people, the economic crisis is far and away their most pressing concern; the same percentage also believe that they have been abandoned by politicians of all stripes, accusing them of acting out of self-interest. In just seven months, since October 2011 to May, the number of people who believe that the current political system, with all its faults, is the best that the country has known has fallen from 72 percent to 56 percent.

Multi-billion-euro bailouts to the banks who caused the mess we’re in, along with myriad recent corruption cases and an ever-worsening unemployment rate, have robbed the country’s politicians of what little credibility they may have enjoyed until the crisis kicked in in 2008, since when unemployment has risen to one in four of the workforce, and millions of families have seen their living standards fall sharply, and tens of thousands more have been made homeless. According to the International Monetary Fund, Spain is living through a lost decade, and will not recover the GDP levels of 2008 until 2018. Who is to blame, if not our politicians?

“People don’t understand how we got into this situation. They do not believe that they deserve what is happening to them, and they feel as though they have been abandoned by the government and the state whose job it is to protect them. I am picking up a growing anger and a demand for those responsible for this mess to be held to account,” says Federico Javaloy, a professor of social psychology at Barcelona University.

José Tudela Aranda, a lecturer in administrative law and a legal advisor to the regional parliament of Aragon, believes that the financial crisis is partly the result of a dismantling of the role of the state.

Full reading here.