Podemos and the Crisis of the Spanish State
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- Published on Sunday, 20 March 2016 22:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1235 .... March 21, 2016
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Podemos and the Crisis of the Spanish State
Early in February, Australian correspondent Dick Nichols, who reports from Catalonia, was interviewed by Tijmen Lucie of the Dutch Socialist Party monthly magazine Spanning. Below is an edited version of the original interview published on March 1 by Spectrezine.
Tijmen Lucie (TL): First of all what can you tell us about Podemos? How did this political party start?
Dick Nichols (DN): It's impossible to understand Podemos without grasping the many-sided crisis of Spanish society and the Spanish state. Podemos expresses the anger and hatred toward the Spanish and European establishment felt by millions of people -- especially the young -- and a deep desire for a radical overhaul of economy, society and state institutions. There are many reasons... for this anger, beginning with Spain's economic crisis. This has created 4.78 million unemployed, kept average pay at its 2001 level, pushed poverty up to record heights (by 2014, 29.2% of the population was in danger of social exclusion), and driven a quarter of a million young people to emigrate.
As for the present Spanish economic ‘recovery’, it is producing a society where the wage share in national income is at its lowest since 1960, where 92 per cent of new work contracts are for casual jobs, and where income inequality is the highest in Europe (with Latvia). Between 2008 and 2011, income for the bottom 10 per cent of Spanish households fell on average by 13%; between 2008 and 2015, over 600,000 home-owners were evicted; in 2015, 770,000 households received not one euro in income. In Spain today, you can work full time and still not be able to make it to the end of the month -- not surprising when 5.9 million workers receive less than the monthly ‘minimum’ age of €655.20.
By contrast, the Spanish banks have received €51.3-billion in bail-out money, while big companies and the mega-wealthy evade more than €50-billion a year in taxes. The social wage has also fallen. The collapse in tax income produced by the crisis has led to deep cuts in public health and education funding (up to 20%), as well as to de facto intervention by the European Commission. In 2011, it forced the Spanish government to amend the constitution to make debt repayment the non-negotiable priority of state budgets.
