Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has unveiled a series of austerity measures which dwarf anything the country has seen before. The list is long: carers of spinal patients and others who cannot fend for themselves will see their wages slashed; unemployment benefits will be cut by 50%. And this in a country in which there are 1.5mn households in which everyone is out of work. Even job centre advisers have been fired in droves. The irony doesn’t get any darker than that. Cuts in social services, cuts in salaries, cuts in holidays - you could call it death by a thousand cuts.
What is really puzzling is how little attention is being paid to the fact that these measures aren’t working. Politics has become such an exercise in public relations and damage control, such an industry of euphemisms and mixed messages, that even when our leaders are clearly wrong they may not even know it.
Have they not realised that since the start of the labour market reforms, unemployment has been going up, rather than down? Can’t they see that cuts in ministerial budgets worth up to 30% are bringing the economy - typically dependent on public expenditure - to a halt? More to the point, if all this pain is inflicted in the name of deficit reduction, shouldn’t the fact that the deficit has not been substantially reduced be considered a sign of failure?
And yet Rajoy insists that, by showing us ready to sacrifice everything we have, we can win the hearts and minds of the markets (that’s assuming they ever had the former and have not lost the latter). But in this case the markets could be right. They may not like high government deficits, but low growth rates are not their cup of tea either. And forecasts say Spain will not grow this year or next year. It doesn’t matter whether we reduce our deficit; if we don’t have growth, investors will only lend us money at unsustainable rates.
The truth is that Rajoy has fallen hostage to his own discourse. He has invested so much of his political capital in the idea that austerity cures all ills that it has now become impossible for him to change course. By trying to play teacher’s pet to Brussels and Berlin he has also helped set the trap he is now in. That’s the problem with over-emphasising that there’s “only one way out”: in the end you’re left with that one way only. And it may not lead outside.
Yet sitting confidently on top of an absolute majority in parliament, Rajoy seems tempted to confuse the exercise of power with the exercise of might. That would be a mistake, as demonstrated on Wednesday. While the prime minister was repeating his tired demand for more sacrifices, striking miners marched through the streets of Madrid, cheered by thousands of people who wanted to show them solidarity - not because they support their specific demands but because at least they are defiant, and they’ve walked 400 miles to Madrid to make their case. With their hard hats decorated with the names of their loved ones, theirs is a sacrifice more people understand than the sacrifices demanded by the government.