José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero assuming as Spanish prime minister at the presence of Juan Carlos I / José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero prometiendo su cargo de presidente del Gobierno para la IX Legislatura ante Juan Carlos I / April 2008 / Public domain
Regular readers will know that I often discuss three deep problems in Spanish society. First of all, the long series of recessions between 2008 and 2014 wounded the finances and life plans of many families and individuals. Secondly, populism has been rife across the political spectrum since about 2012. Thirdly, allegedly left-wing people are often far too quick to accept right-wing and nativist narratives in Catalonia.
Of course, it would be naive to blame major societal issues on one person. However, it is remarkable to me that when we look at all three problems, we can see bad decisions by one particularly incompetent politician at crucial times. It is time to meet José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is quite possibly the worst Spanish politician of the 21st century so far - an incredible achievement given the stiff competition he faces from across the spectrum. And, yes, that includes Carles Puigdement, a man who went through the motions of a self-coup in Catalonia in 2017 and then ran away when it was clear that his bluff hadn’t worked.
To set the scene, let’s backtrack to the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many ordinary Spaniards had survived Francisco Franco’s dictatorship from the 1930s to the 1970s while keeping their heads down and developing a somewhat live-and-let-live attitude. The dictatorship had begun with bloodshed, but it ended with an economic boom as the country became a powerhouse of the European tourism industry, with much upward mobility as a result.
Many Spaniards had developed a strong allergy to Spanish nationalism and state-enforced Catholicism during these decades. In this context, the centre of gravity for politics during the transition to democracy and soon afterwards was almost certainly going to be based on some secular version of social democracy. The first party to find a way of combining a market-based economy that could accommodate personal ambitions and aspirations with a welfare state plus moderately competent governance and a little progressive rhetoric about a new start would be in pole position.
The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which had been founded in 1879, was re-legalised in 1977. It abandoned Marxism in 1979 - a necessary step on the path to becoming a major player in the new context. Under the charismatic leadership of Felipe González (a former firebrand), the party stormed to victory with a landslide in 1982 with 10.1m votes. This represented 48% of the vote and gave the Socialist leader a very respectable majority in parliament. He planned to govern as a mainstream European social democrat from the moderate centre left.
Spain had joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) a few months before the 1982 election. This was controversial with many leftists in Spain - Franco’s Spanish nationalist dictatorship had received a new lease of life in 1953 after agreeing the Pact of Madrid with the United States (US).
Spain’s status as a player on the Western side during the Cold War gave Franco’s regime time and space to encourage tourism, liberalise the economy, and create a new middle class as many people from rural areas moved towards large industrial cities like Barcelona and Bilbao, as well as the capital, Madrid. While the dictator never dropped his lip service to fascistic imagery, these were emphasised less after 1953.
Much of the modernisation of the economy was overseen by technocrats affiliated by Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei, which had founded IESE, a well-regarded business school, in Barcelona in 1958. To this day, many Spanish leftists think that liberalisation, economic liberalism, and even economic growth are tainted by this association with the dictatorship and the Catholic right.
Despite widespread concerns about NATO on Spain’s left, González dropped his opposition to the American-led defence organisation after becoming prime minister (PM). Seeing that many Socialist voters were reluctant to follow him, he convoked a referendum on NATO membership in 1986, soon after the country joined the European Union (EU). He campaigned hard for NATO, and won convincingly.
Under González’s leadership, the PSOE won a second landslide in 1986 with 8.9m votes. This fell to 8.1m votes in 1989. His third victory was just short of a majority, but he was able to govern again thanks to a little dealmaking with smaller parties. He won 9.2m votes in 1993, but was further away from a majority as the national centre right was getting more organised. He had to turn to Jordi Pujol, the godfather of Catalan nationalism, to help him govern for a final term.
González brought home several showy wins, like the Seville Expo of 1992 and the Barcelona Olympics of the same year, plus the launch of an excellent high-speed railway line. However, his support failed to grow significantly for reasons we will discuss shortly. The PSOE held onto 9.4m votes in 1996, but it was over-taken for the first time by the centre-right Popular Party (PP), which was able to govern nationally for the first time with Pujol’s support. It had been formally founded in 1989, although it had its roots in a slightly older alliance created by post-Francoist politicians who wanted to build a democratic conservative party from the 1970s.
Although González’s time as PM should largely be treated as a success, his reputation faces two serious problems. The first was rampant corruption in the Socialist Party (an issue that has also dogged other major Spanish parties, including the PP and Pujol’s Catalan nationalists), combined with a murky and incompetent dirty war against Basque terrorists that was financed off the books. The second was the early 1990s recession, which began in Spain just as the building work for the Barcelona Olympics was coming to an end in 1992.
The Socialist worldview was (and is) largely about protecting workers who happen to have jobs. This can lead to serious unintended consequences in a recession that is characterised by high jobless rates - employers can be reluctant to contract new workers if it is hard to get rid of new hires who don’t work out. Two Socialist finance ministers, Carlos Solchaga (in place until 1993) and the late Pedro Solbes (1993 to 1996), failed to find a solution to this conundrum.
By the time of the 1996 election, unemployment in Spain was the worst in the whole of the EU, with rates of almost 23% of the workforce. It was up to an eye-watering 42% among young people. The combination of sleaze with economic mismanagement proved particularly unpalatable to many voters.
One member of the country’s long baby-boom generation (those born between 1958 and 1975) once told me that the PSOE’s mishandling of the 1990s recession was the single biggest disappointment of his entire life. This comment unlocks one of the biggest secrets of the late 1990s and early 2000s that outsiders to Spain might not have realised: support for the PP was boosted by disheartened progressives, who either abstained or held their noses as they supported the away team.
The PP proved much more adept at rekindling the country’s animal spirits in difficult times. This is not necessarily a glowing endorsement, though. The centre-right party would also prove to be mired in corruption; and much of the job creation was for low-productivity posts, often in construction or tourism. Under the leadership of PM José María Aznar, the PP went on to win a full majority in 2000, uniting the centre and right of the spectrum from disappointed progressives to liberals, Christian democrats, social conservatives and a few headbangers on the hard right.
There was much left-wing gnashing of teeth every time Aznar’s team threw scraps of red meat at the party’s more right-wing elements, but looking back at this time in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit it is hard to see what leftists were getting so over-excited about. It was very interesting to observers like me, who try to stay neutral instead of backing one side or another, when Aznar’s government got rid of compulsory military service in 2001 - a liberal policy instead of a conservative one. A controversial security law didn’t come until much later, until 2015.
Aznar’s full majority in 2000 gave him some serious political capital. He decided to cash some of it in by supporting the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was an extraordinary decision given how widespread hostility to the war was in Spain at the time. I remember walking down Huertas (a long street in central Madrid) between meetings on a business trip from London and seeing anti-war stickers and slogans on pretty much every single building.
It is now time to introduce Zapatero properly. He was born in 1960 and grew up in a middle-class home in León that was sympathetic to Spain’s Communist Party (a relatively common position in that time and place given strong communist opposition to Franco during the Civil War and the dictatorship). He studied law at the local university. He saw González speak at a rally before the PSOE was re-legalised and joined the party in 1979. He was on the left of the party at first. He became a member of parliament (MP) for León in 1986, and was re-elected in the next four elections.
In 2000, Zapatero announced a plan to run for the party leadership, modelling himself on a wafer-thin commitment to the “third way” policies being developed by Tony Blair in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. A dark horse candidate, senior members of the Catalan branch of the Socialists backed him early on. The rest of the PSOE was seriously divided between traditionalists and modernisers at the time. Many picked the 39-year-old MP from León as their second choice. He eventually won by a slim margin as his main rival, who was much better known, had too many enemies.
After Zapatero had been leader of the opposition for a few years, Aznar called a new general election for March 2004, with his deputy PM Mariano Rajoy as the candidate for the PP. Although the Iraq War was unpopular, unemployment was low, and many voters had yet to forgive the Socialists for the party’s lack at skill in navigating recessions. Polls suggested that the PP would be likely to win its second full majority.
Everything changed on Thursday 11 March 2004, three days before the election. Ten bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid. The death toll would rise to 193, with 2,500 injuries. It was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history. The PP, which had taken a hard line on Basque terrorism, immediately blamed Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) and - disgracefully - tried to hold this line even after al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. The message from the Islamist group cited “the crimes you have committed in the world and in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular.”
Unsurprisingly, the Spanish public rebelled against the shameless and cynical lies and conspiracy theories coming from Aznar’s government in the aftermath of the bombing. On the day of the election, Zapatero’s PSOE received an unprecedented 11.0m votes, while Rajoy’s PP fell to 9.8m. Despite falling short of a majority in the election, Zapatero became PM for the first time in April 2004 when smaller parties backed his leadership.
The economy was still doing well, thanks to ultra-low interest rates in the euro (Spain had joined the common currency under Aznar in 1999). This had led to cheap credit and a construction boom. The PSOE leader failed to see that the boom was built on thin ice, but - to be fair - it is unlikely that PP leader Rajoy would have spotted that the good times were destined to come to an ugly end before the credit crunch got underway in 2007. Zapatero later won the 2008 election with 11.3m votes, which came within spitting distance of a majority.
Much of Zapatero’s record between 2004 and 2011 should be fairly uncontroversial for progressive types. He withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq, legalised same-sex marriage, reformed an old-fashioned abortion law, negotiated a ceasefire from ETA, which later turned into a lasting peace, and restricted smoking in public in a society where cigarettes were still a common vice. It is worth mentioning that the policies on same-sex marriage, abortion, and divorce angered many Catholics - a theme we will return to later in this essay.
Unfortunately, for Zapatero’s reputation, though, he also normalised populism and energised the Catalan independence movement before indulging in some truly spectacular economic mismanagement. Let’s turn to populism first. As regular readers know, populism is defined by political scientists as anti-pluralism. It is a style of politics that pretends that one side is the true voice of the people. Populists who win elections often smear the opposition as illegitimate.
When populists spend any time in power, they tend to undermine the institutions that are meant to hold them back, whether through democratic backsliding or self-coups. Much of the populism we have seen recently, from Brexit to Trump, has been from the right, but the left is perfectly capable of being populist too, as many Venezuelans will know all too well.
Zapatero’s pivot to populism while in power was based on a simplified reading of history, somewhat bizarrely. Civil wars are always messy and tragic, and Spain’s in the 1930s had been no exception. It split many Spanish families down the middle. Widespread conscription meant that many soldiers had been forced to fight for sides that they didn’t support. In the contemporary world, the average Spanish family has members who had fought on both sides.
Atrocities committed by Franco’s Nationalist side are well known, but the anti-clerical Republic had also failed to protect the rich, Catholics, and conservatives from atrocities by anarchists and other revolutionaries. As the war ground to its bitter end in the late 1930s, the smartest observers came to realise that it was no longer a fight between democracy and dictatorship. Instead, it was a fight to see if Spain’s next dictator would be a left-wing tyrant backed by the Soviet Union or a right-wing autocrat backed by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy.
Spanish society had come to an uneasy truce in the 1970s, with an amnesty law that let elderly war criminals die in their bed in return for support for democracy from fascistic Spanish nationalists plus their children, grandchildren and other associates. The Constitution in 1978 found a way to balance the indivisibility of Spain with regional autonomy as part of a newly founded constitutional monarchy. The formula won a broad consensus across society in a referendum. The new framework was designed to be as inclusive as possible, with room for everyone from communists to Catalan nationalists without alienating those on the far right who were thinking of moving to the democratic hard right.
The death toll from the Spanish Civil War is a matter of fierce debate among historians. The figures range from 250,000 to 1m. Deaths from atrocities were probably 130,000 to 200,000 people systematically killed by Nationalists, with around 38,000 to 50,000 killed behind Republican lines (often by anarchists and others, as mentioned earlier). Many of the bodies were put in mass graves and have never been found. A movement to recover the bodies of family members, particularly those killed by Franco’s Nationalist death squads, picked up a head of steam while Zapatero was in power. This was covered extensively by Giles Tremlett in Ghosts of Spain.
Zapatero’s instincts in starting a conversation about the Civil War in the early 2000s were absolutely right; and his emphasis on the brutality of Franco’s coup was historically justified. Unfortunately, though, he decided to politicise the debate by ignoring the complexities and presenting the Civil War as a simple fight between goodies and baddies. This point of view was always likely to alienate many practicing Catholics (about 15% of the population, although estimates vary). A large number of churchgoers felt that the Republic had failed to protect the more than 6,800 clerics and Catholics that were killed in the Red Terror at the start of the war.
Any mention of the PSOE’s role in the ill-fated revolution of 1934 (up to 2,000 deaths in a fortnight, including the murder of 33 priests) was notable by its absence from Zapatero’s historical exercise, let alone any mention of torture or other atrocities by PSOE-affiliated militias throughout the later Civil War.
Spanish parliament passed the Historical Memory Law in 200, just after the Holy See beatified 491 cleric and seven lay Catholics who were slaughtered between 1934 and 1937. Much to Zapatero’s delight, the PP (a party that often offers a lightweight defence of Catholic values in a largely secular society) voted against the bill on the technically correct but emotionally unsatisfying grounds that it weakened the amnesty of the 1970s. This decision allowed Zapatero’s side to smear the PP as heirs to Franco, while implying that contemporary centre-right politicians in the early 2000s were somehow responsible for Nationalist atrocities some 70 years earlier.
In other words, Zapatero almost single-handedly smashed the inclusive consensus that lay behind the country’s transition to democracy in order to gain a short-lived partisan advantage against mainstream conservatives.
Perhaps strangely, Zapatero’s forebears in the Second Republic (established in 1931) had made a similar mistake in the 1930s by striving to create a constitutional order that excluded or marginalised Catholics and many voices on the right, with tragic results. The Catholic Church ended up backing Franco’s coup against the Second Republic, which began in 1936 and triggered the Civil War. Franco’s Nationalist side won in 1939, with the help of fascists from Germany and Italy. An exhausted Spain then sat out the Second World War instead of joining the Axis. Franco’s deep commitment to Catholicism has led to decades of scholarly debate about the extent that his regime should be categorised as a full-bodied fascist one.
Arguing that one side in a democratic debate is illegitimate is nearly always a populist move. The hard left, and later Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez, have taken Zapatero’s gambit and run with it in the following years. As the Civil War generation has slowly died off, the PP has got much better at dealing with this issue. The party finally condemned Franco’s dictatorship and atrocities with no “ifs” or “buts” in 2021.
Meanwhile, the PP’s hard right split off to form a new Spanish nationalist party, called Vox, in 2013 as the mainstream conservative party inched towards a more thoughtful stance on the Civil War. Last year, one of Vox’s MPs described Franco’s dictatorship as “a stage of progress to achieve national unity,” to much gnashing of teeth on the left. Sánchez’s PSOE continues to use the idea that the PP might do deals with Vox to justify his own tactics, including cutting deals with a party led by a former ETA terrorist and selling an amnesty for a self-coup attempt to Puigdemont’s Catalan separatists in return for their parliamentary support.
This brings us nicely to Catalonia, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities. The Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC) was founded in 1979 through the merger of three left-wing parties. It has an autonomous structure, but is federated to the PSOE. Perhaps strangely, the party draws much of its talent from Catalan speakers from posh parts of Barcelona city, but much of its support from Spanish speakers from the city’s industrial outskirts.
The PSC’s leadership is often sympathetic to watered down versions of Catalan nationalism, although the party nearly always stops short of full-blown support for independence. This worldview, which is based on the alleged need to protect the Catalan language from encroachment by the Spanish language, often has a right-wing and nativist flavour. The unstated implication of these narratives is often that the Catalan-speaking minority, many of them wealthy, need protection; while migrants from the rest of Spain or immigrants from Latin America, many of them with aspirations of social mobility, are somehow an alien presence in the land.
As a result of these dynamics, there is often a strong gap between the views of the PSC’s well-heeled leadership and those of its voters, many of whom are descended from working-class migrants from other regions of Spain, who moved to Barcelona province between the 1950s and the 1980s in search of factory jobs. The PSC’s sympathies with Catalan nationalism also tend to irritate politicians from other branches of the PSOE.
Shortly before Zapatero’s unexpected victory in 2004, the PSC had gained power in Catalonia in 2003 through an alliance with the local greens and an allegedly left-wing separatist party. Zapatero did the PSC a favour by agreeing to negotiate a new regional statute. The new statute was agreed in 2006, replacing the one from 1979. It won a poorly attended referendum in the same year.
Crucially, though, Zapatero’s team did a sloppy job on the technical side during the negotiations. Legal scholars talk about a concept called the hierarchy of laws. It means that a lower law, such a regional statute, can never contradict a higher one, such as a clause in a Constitution. Zapatero basically wrote a blank cheque to the PSC and its allies; and let Catalan nationalists write a statute that was more aspirational than reality-based.
The PP argued - perfectly correctly - that much of the new statute contradicted the Constitution of 1978. The party appealed. In 2010, the Constitutional Court of Spain annulled 14 articles and dictated the interpretation of 27 more. One of its rulings was that the word “nation” in the preamble had no legal standing. There were angry demonstrations in Barcelona shortly afterwards.
Right-wing Catalan nationalists from Pujol’s party, Convergence & Union (CiU), regained power in the autonomous community at the end of 2010. Puigdemont was a local councillor in Girona for CiU at the time. Under the leadership of new party leader Artur Mas, CiU used the court’s ruling as a central argument for the need for independence as the party pivoted towards full-blown populism and separatism. A little more homework and sophistication from Zapatero’s side a few years previously would have made these arguments much less compelling to angry Catalans, who were reeling from the series of recessions that began on his watch.
By the time a global credit crunch started in mid-2007, Spain’s construction sector was running white hot. Between 1995 and 2008, property prices had increased three times. Around 5m homes were built between 2000 and 2008. The construction sector was responsible for about a quarter of all new jobs between 1998 and 2007. By the time the global credit crunch started, construction employed some 2.6m people, representing nearly 14% of the workforce.
Fresh elections were due in March 2008. By that time, it was obvious to serious people that Spain was about to begin a new and uncomfortable cycle. Just like Aznar’s team, which decided to lie about an inconvenient bombing in 2004, Zapatero decided to pretend that everything was hunky dory. He infamously described the Spanish economy as being part of the “global Champion’s League” in September 2007. He also refused to say the word “crisis” (which means both “crisis” and “recession” in Spanish) until July 2008, by which time he had won that year’s elections. It was already far too late for a serious reaction.
During this time, Zapatero also publicly attacked The Financial Times for daring to suggest that the economic cycle was changing. He also smeared international investors who were preparing themselves for the coming recession as “speculators.”
An economist once told me that what Zapatero’s finance team, led by deputy PM and economy minister Solbes (in office for a second stint from 2004 to 2009), should have done in late 2007 or early 2008 was to immediately start retraining construction workers, many of whom lacked basic computing skills. Of course, this didn’t happen.
Instead, Solbes and Zapatero’s first reaction to the looming crisis involved huge building works throughout Spain. I remember a road next to my home getting pedestrianised, which was nice for residents, but not particularly good timing. The last burst of publicly funded construction proved unsustainable, not to mention expensive for public finances. By 2012, Spain’s building trade would employ just over a million people - a drop of nearly 60% from the peak.
Regular readers will know just how bad the series of recessions got. Let me try and sum it up in just two paragraphs. Unemployment soared above 5m, hitting one in four in 2012. Although we don’t have exact figures, around 2% of the population lost their homes amid a wave of evictions. Squatting became commonplace. Public debt soared 86% on Zapatero’s watch. His team repeated González and Solbes’ mistake from the 1990s recession and protected people who happened to have jobs, which once again made it hard to find the exit ramp. There were similar problems in countries like Portugal, Greece, and Italy. Investment into Southern Europe fell off a cliff. The very survival of the euro was in doubt for a while. The country received a bailout in 2012 to recapitalise its banking market after the PSOE had been voted out of power.
Many people were understandably angry, particularly young people who should have been buying homes, getting promoted, and starting families instead of scrounging a free place to stay in the spare rooms of relative. Simple solutions to complex problems came into vogue, as is often the way when people are angry. Populism flourished, both with the Catalan independence movement and the hard left. Both movements took the alleged illegitimacy of the PP and ran with it. The hard right was a little slower to catch the wave, but Vox was founded in 2013; and by 2019 around one in ten of its supporters had previously voted for the populist left.
During Zapatero’s second term, elections weren’t due until 2012. He replaced Solbes as finance minister with Elena Salgado between 2009 and 2011, but she also failed to find a solution to the long series of recessions. The PM called a snap election in 2011. By this time, he was so unpopular that he decided not to run himself.
Deputy PM Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba led the PSOE to a historic thumping, with just 7.0m votes. Rajoy’s PP won a full majority and the PP’s new PM appointed former investment banker and future central banker Luis de Guindos to get the economy back on track. Amazingly, he succeeded, with considerable help from Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) at the time. It is worth mentioning that many of the new jobs came with temporary contracts and low wages.
A technocrat with sympathies for Opus Dei, de Guindos was in many ways a throwback to the people who first modernised Spain’s economy between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. As a result, his stewardship of the economy rarely receives the credit that it should have done, with the exception of his former peers in Spanish finance. His excellent stewardship of the economy was also somewhat over-shadowed by the revelation of widespread and systematic corruption throughout the PP during the Aznar era. Many of these stories broke during Rajoy’s time in power, which ended with a vote of no confidence after an explosive court case showed systematic corruption in the PP in 2018.
De Guindos joined Draghi at the ECB in 2018 and is still there although the Italian’s eight-year term came to an end in 2019. Draghi, of course, enjoyed a short stint as a technocratic PM of Italy before the hard right stormed to power.
What happened to Zapatero? Many people felt that his record was so shameful that he should never appear in public again. However, he re-emerged as an ally and supporter of Sánchez, Spain’s PM since ousting Rajoy in 2018. In power, Sánchez has taken his predecessor’s flirtation with populism and taken it to greater heights. His administration also faces multiple overlapping corruption investigations.
Zapatero also acts as an apologist for the populist left-wing dictatorship in Venuzuela. Nicolás Maduro is one of the few politicians in the world to have a worse record of economic stewardship than Zapatero himself. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez also successfully excluded liberals and conservatives from the country’s constitutional order, with predictably terrible results.
Zapatero has also lobbied for China. In this, the analogies with Schröder in 2000 finally come to life, even if those with Blair proved to be further from the mark (with the exception of any parallels between the Basque Country and Northern Ireland). The former Chancellor helped turn Germany into the largest buyer of Russian gas during his time in power (1998 to 2005). Since then, he has also sat on the board of companies run by the Russian state. He has been friends with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for decades. This became much more controversial than it had been after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Business executive Víctor de Aldama is one of the key figures in the ongoing corruption scandals that are dogging current Socialist PM Sánchéz. The fixer and intermediary is upset that that Zapatero has criticised him publicly. In an interview in June, Aldama said that Zapatero joined him on a private jet between Caracas (the capital of Venezuela) and Santo Domingo, where foreign income is generally not taxed. He challenged the former PM to tell Spaniards what was in his luggage on that trip. Zapatero has not responded to Aldama’s interview; and has not pressed charges for defamation. On the other hand, he has denied rumours that he owns the rights to a gold mine in Venezuela.
The Spanish press sometimes has fun talking about Zapatero’s newfound status as a multi-millionaire since leaving power. The former PM and his wife own three luxury properties in Madrid and Lanzarote. The gap between his incompetence in power and his net worth as a private citizen raises eyebrows among many, including his critics on the left of the spectrum.
Spain is a country where politicians are rarely popular, and to this day Zapatero is hated more than most. This is very understandable, given the multiple errors of judgement that we have discussed today. He might face stiff opposition for the prize of the country’s worst politician from the likes of Puigdemont and the various politicians who proved so corrupt that they have been sent to prison, but I believe that the wooden spoon belongs to him and him alone.
To conclude this essay, let me say what Zapatero should have done. First of all, a less ambitious regional statute for Catalonia, drafted in consultation with the opposition and constitutional lawyers, would have proved significantly less explosive. Secondly, a more thoughtful and less combative approach to the Civil War could have laid the ghosts of Spain to rest for good, instead of letting them return to once again to haunt contemporary society. Thirdly, his team should have been much more responsive to feedback from investors, economists, and the financial press on the status of the economic cycle as the credit crunch began.
There is a deeper point. Zapatero chose to delegitimise the centre right without addressing his own side’s shortcomings. Instead, he should have accepted a straight fight with the PP while improving the Spanish left’s record of economic stewardship in tough times.
The comments are closed, as usual when I discuss Catalan nationalists, who can be very annoying on the internet, as can populists of all stripes. If subscribers want to discuss this article, just press reply to the email in your inbox. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Democratic backsliding and self-coups
Latest essay on the multiple corruption scandals under Sánchez
Further Reading
What is Populism by Jan-Werner Müller
Doves of War: Four Women of Spain by Paul Preston
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas
Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the fourth-anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky and Mastodon are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.