Translated material
Vote with your wallet!
Dmitry Sabov; Dmitry Polikarpov
The victory of the Spanish liberals in the parliamentary elections by such a margin was a surprise for the winners themselves
The victory of the Spanish liberals in the parliamentary elections by such a margin was a surprise for the winners themselves
Left : Catholic Spain is unrecognizable - a participant in a carnival procession dressed as a woman came in to fulfill his civic duty. Right : ETA emerges from the shadows - after a 14-month truce, the Basque terrorist organization kills again. This explosion killed Lieutenant Colonel Blanco Garcia in Madrid ( Photo: AP )
Four years ago, in 1996, the victory of the People's Party (PP) in the parliamentary elections put an end to fifteen years of socialist rule, and a neatly combed and buttoned-up Castilian sat in the prime minister's chair instead of the smiling populist Felipe Gonzalez, originally from Andalusian peasants. Jose Maria Aznar, former tax official.
Then the rightists were ahead of the socialists by some 300 thousand votes (this is with 34 million voters) - mainly due to the scandals that befell their competitors. In a country that, after decades of the Franco regime, has acquired a strong immunity against right-wing ideology, and, on the contrary, perceives the left as fighters for democracy, it seemed that the leaders of the PP would never be able to maintain their insignificant advantage in the next elections. Moreover, the years of Aznar’s reign coincided with the period of transition to the euro currency. As a result, Spanish voters found themselves squeezed by tax corsets no less than the French and Germans, who took revenge on their right-wingers for the strict reorganization of the state budget by electing to replace them the center-leftists - Jospin and Schröder. The same thing seemed to happen on the other side of the Pyrenees.
On the night of March 12-13, 2000, it became clear that the era of doubt was over: these days, it turns out, liberals can also be popular. A crowd of thousands gathered at the headquarters of the PP greeted the voting results like Real Madrid's victory in the Champions League - the football cry "We are the champions!" and car horns kept Madrid awake until the morning. The Socialists and their voters could not hold back their tears.
And there was a reason. In fact, the PP led by Aznar not only won 27 more seats than four years ago and thereby inflicted a crushing defeat on its main competitors - Socialist leader Joaquin Almunia resigned an hour after the polls closed. She won an absolute majority in parliament (183 seats out of 350). For Spain, this is almost a revolution: the new majority is not obliged to make concessions to the regions in order to enter into a coalition with nationalist parties (the most influential are the Catalan and Basque ones).
By voting for a policy that we would call shock, the Spaniards demonstrated that consensus is possible on the basis of liberal reforms - of course, if they are carried out competently and the population is allowed to feel their fruits. “Everything is fine with Spain! Let’s move on,” 47-year-old Aznar tirelessly repeated at election rallies, and his supporters, mostly young, responded with applause. Even opponents did not object: the main pre-election demand of the socialists was a more equitable distribution of the capital that Aznar had accumulated for the country. One of the Spanish newspapers defined this consensus the day after the vote as follows: on March 12, the Spaniards voted not with their hearts, but with their wallets. The era of voting for or against democracy in elections is over. In full accordance with the European standard, the Spanish voter voted for the level of consumption, tax rates, investment and the development of knowledge-intensive industries.
“Socialism, in my opinion, is from a past life,” the Spanish prime minister noted in a pre-election interview with the International Herald Tribune. Over the four years of his reign, Aznar presented his compatriots and Europe with irrefutable evidence of this thesis. GDP growth in Spain today is one of the highest in Europe (almost four percent per year compared to two percent in 1996), which experts from the Bank of Spain attribute to successful macroeconomic reforms and rapid growth in consumption. The country triumphantly entered the “euro zone”, simultaneously setting European records for the reorganization of the state budget (its deficit today is 1.1 percent of GDP compared to 4.4 in 1996) and for the creation of new jobs (from 22 percent in 1996). m unemployment fell to 15.4, and in the foreseeable future the government aims to eradicate it altogether).
But what is even more striking about these figures, which testify to the successes of “Latin liberalism,” is the pragmatism and willingness to tighten belts in the name of economic development that has gripped the entire society. Trade unions, historically close to the Socialist Party and even the Communist Party, are showing unprecedented accommodating behavior: they are ready to negotiate with employers in a way “so that this does not hinder the development of new technologies and production.” As for Spanish entrepreneurs, after large-scale privatization (during the years of Aznar's premiership, 43 large enterprises, including banks, passed into private hands, and this brought 27 billion euros to the budget), they never cease to amaze American and European competitors.
By placing the “necessary” specialists in state-owned companies, which were then privatized, Aznar achieved his goal. Managers of the new wave, who, as a rule, completed courses in American universities and worked in international concerns, brought Spanish companies and banks to the forefront. Telefonica is one of the most powerful European concerns in the field of communications, its subsidiary Terra Network is on the Internet. The Santander bank and the Tabacalera company, which recently merged with the French tobacco company Seita, are very successful; medium and small businesses are rapidly growing. The country no longer feels like a backwater of Europe, and Spanish managers are willingly hired everywhere in the world.
The main question that stood before the elections was formulated as follows: what to do with economic growth? Should we share the fruits of prosperity among everyone, as the socialists proposed, or, as Aznar suggested, “move on”? Today, when the answer of the Spaniards is already known, another lesson of Spanish liberalism is extremely important for the world: it is the well-being and standard of living that can defeat separatism. In the Basque Country, where the terrorist organization ETA called for a boycott of the elections so that pro-Madrid parties would not receive the Basque vote, this call was never heeded. The car bombings and casualties with which ETA tried to bolster its argument only alienated voters, especially in the cities. The number of abstentions in the Basque Country was only 5.5 percent above the national average, and Aznar's Popular Party held seven deputies from the region - the same as the local Basque Nationalist Party, moderate nationalists who believe negotiations with ETA are possible. The reasons are obvious: because of terrorism, the Basques cannot live on par with other compatriots, they are losing tourists, investments, and prospects.
The pre-election bombings only turned out the few ETA supporters from the election campaign. The majority of Basques, along with the Spaniards, voted to “move on.”