A deep recession that has led to soaring unemployment and austerity cuts has failed to spark popular anger in Spain, where the unions are reluctant to put pressure on the government, analysts say.
Although May Day rallies drew tens of thousands of people protesting the crisis, they were not on a scale or intensity that could alarm the government.
Certainly, they were nothing like the violent demonstrations that erupted in debt-ridden Greece on Saturday.
“The [Spanish] trade unions have been quiet for the past several years, and now it’s difficult to get the engines started,” said Cayo Laro, the secretary general of the United Left coalition.
Spain suddenly found itself in recession in late 2008 after several years of strong economic growth based on its booming property sector.
Since then, possible motives for public anger have grown steadily.
Official data on Friday showed that the jobless rate had soared to more than 20 percent, double the eurozone average; the government this year launched an austerity plan to rein in the public deficit that includes tax rises; labor reforms are being studied and the government plans to raise the legal retirement age.
Unlike in Greece and Portugal, two eurozone countries also under pressure over their public deficits, reaction on the streets has been relatively subdued.
“There have not been any really unpopular measures taken for the moment,” said Gayle Allard, an economist at the IE business school in Madrid.
Unlike Athens and Lisbon, the socialist government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has thus far shied away from freezing salaries.
In addition, “the system of unemployment benefits is much more generous” than in other countries,” sociologist Fermin Bouza said.
“Perhaps when the benefits run out, we are going to see something,” Allard said.
However, there are deeper reasons for the popular apathy.
For one thing, the unions do not want to step up popular pressure on the government.
“They think hard before sending people onto the streets,” Bouza said.
For Allard, it’s because they are “very politicized,” close to the socialist government, subsidized and “not very representative.”
“Spain is a country of small and medium-sized businesses where it is much more difficult to have union representation,” said Cristina Bermejo, secretary general of the youth wing of the CCOO union.
Another factor is family solidarity.
“The family is very strong here, each member helps others” when they are in financial trouble, Allard said.
The underground economy is also extensive, and a large number of the 4.6 million people who are officially unemployed are not in fact jobless, both Bouza and Allard said.
Allard estimated that almost 1.4 million of them work in the underground economy.
However, unions put the government on notice at Saturday’s May Day rally that things could change.
“We don’t know what imposing a restrictive budget for the year 2011 will mean,” UGT leader Candido Mendez said. “If that means reducing the guarantees for unemployment benefits, we will have a major labour conflict.”
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS