For nearly 10 months, there was no government in Spain.
But finally, on Oct. 29, the center-right People’s Party’s (PP) Mariano Rajoy was once again sworn in as the country’s prime minister after winning a tepid vote of confidence in the Spanish parliament.
And while Rajoy, who first came to power in 2011, may now be out of political limbo, he is definitely going to have his work cut out for him trying to pull together his minority party and a deeply divided congress.
Just getting the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) — which had since the start of the year obstinately blocked Rajoy’s return to power because of the extreme austerity policies imposed during his first term — to abstain long enough for the PP to end the impasse and get its leader back in Moncloa Palace was a major accomplishment and required plenty of political haggling.
The tedious process included two inconclusive elections and Olympian marathons of horse trading with smaller parties that have traditionally been at loggerheads with the PP.
Now that he’s finally won the investiture vote and is back in office, Rajoy is going to have to court the opposition even further, making concessions to the Basque and Canary Islands parties in order to pass next year’s budget.
He will also have to tackle Spain’s soaring public deficit (currently at about 5.2 percent of GDP) and private debt (nearly 150 percent of GDP) — either by cutting spending or raising taxes, both unpopular options with the voting public — and he will have to fix the country’s broken pension and health care systems.
Moreover, at a staggering 18.9 percent, Spain has the second-highest unemployment rate in the European Union, right after Greece.
Beyond economic challenges, Rajoy will have to grapple with the thorny issue of Catalonia, Spain’s wealthy northeastern region which has been itching for succession for the last half decade and has threatened to hold a referendum on the issue in 2017 if Rajoy doesn’t address its concerns through adapting a more federalist system.
(To rewrite Spain’s 1978 constitution to establish a less centralized structure would require a two-thirds majority from lawmakers, which is highly unlikely given that the PP holds only 137 seats in parliament out of 350, so good luck with that one.)
And then there’s the little matter of a cluster of corruption scandals that have plagued both Rajoy and his party for the last two years.
Like a bad penny, those allegations keep coming back to haunt the 61-year-old Rajoy, and, sooner or later, he is going to have to confront them head on.
But, in the end, Rajoy’s most formidable challenge may turn out to be just trying to hold his fragile government together in the most fragmented parliament in Spanish history.
In Rajoy’s favor is the fact that the Spanish economy, after a demoralizing six-year recession that lasted through 2013, managed to grow to be 3.2 percent last year, representing one of the highest increases in the eurozone, and Spain’s central bank is counting on a similar uptick for 2016.
Now the PP will have to translate that increase in GDP into sustainable growth with full-time jobs for Spain’s anxious unemployed.
Notwithstanding, although the PP may not have a majority in parliament, Rajoy does have one last ace up his sleeve, which is the threat of calling early elections that could pit the fragmented center-left Socialists and far-left Podemos parties against one another, thus reinforcing the People’s Party’s dominance.
Most Spaniards are taking a wait-and-see approach, hoping for the best and bracing for the worse.
A recent poll conducted by Spain’s La Sexta TV indicated that 61 percent of those questioned did not expect the new government to survive beyond six months, compared to 26 percent who were optimistic about its future.
Only time will tell if the PP leader can prove his detractors wrong, and, for now, Rajoy has precious little of that to squander.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected]
