Hither and thither

Congress on Thursday gave its approval to the labor reform decree passed by the government on August 26. Thanks to the main opposition Popular Party's decision to abstain, the Socialists were able to reject the offer of the CiU Catalan nationalist bloc to vote in favor on the condition that regional agreements would hold greater sway in collective bargaining regulations. It is surprising how CiU manages to slide so quickly from a Homeric sense of injustice in some issues to the lowest form of political horse-trading in others.

The decree that has now cleared Congress constitutes a reversal of a decision adopted by this very government in 2006, when a time restriction of two years was put on the rolling over of temporary work contracts. At the time, the argument was the need to combat precarious labor conditions; now it is the need to reduce unemployment. And despite Labor Minister Valeriano Gómez's efforts to distinguish between temporary and precarious work conditions, it is undeniable that the government has performed a U-turn that once more puts a question mark over its capacity to manage the current economic crisis.

But labor reform is not the only area where the Zapatero administration is giving the impression of being cast adrift, indolently following one current only to end up back where it started. It is easy to understand that Spain needs to balance its books, and for obvious reasons of fairness it is preferable that those who have more contribute more to help resolve the crisis. But the reviving of the wealth tax turned this past week into a spin-fest of varying, imprecise and sometimes contradictory messages from different members of the government and the team of the official Socialist prime-ministerial candidate, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. As in the case of temporary contracts, the same government announces one thing one day, and changes it the next. Far from improving the chances of the Socialist Party, this wavering can only further demoralize its potential voters.

It was never going to be easy to manage the kind of internal succession process Zapatero designed. But on top of the intrinsic difficulties of the operation, there is growing clumsiness in the execution. This week's slip-ups have undermined Rubalcaba's objective of gaining a credibility boost by promoting the return of a wealth tax.