A dearth of explanations

The prime minister's explanations on the government's budget adjustment program announced on December 30 come a little late. And this is important because it has to do not only with due courtesy and the spirit of transparency but with the necessary promptness of political reaction at a time when the latter is often defeated by the speed of the markets, as the continued punishment of the Spanish sovereign debt has shown in recent months.

But as sometimes happens with defects of form, this delay would have seemed minimal had the arguments used been real amplifications of those already used by his ministers; or even negligible had announcements of his immediate plans convincingly clarified the picture. However, hardly any of this was present in the prime minister's first public explanation, and we must await his next parliamentary appearance to learn about his plans in more detail.

In fact, the area where Mariano Rajoy has been most concrete, as had often been demanded of him, is in a matter not of the future but of the immediate past: the detailed breakdown of the public deficit encountered on his coming to power. In the light of the provisional figures now offered, his level of unawareness of the legacy received cannot have been very great. The overshoot directly attributable to the previous government is only three tenths of a percentage point. Three quarters of the deficit in excess of the forecast can at first sight be blamed on the regional governments, of various political colors. Thus the primary responsibility is shared between the major parties; though the secondary responsibility, that of supervision, of course rests with the Zapatero government. All, though in unequal measure, made the same mistakes. All must work to remedy them.

In the news agency EFE's interview with the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy leans rather hard on the message that the recently decreed tax hike is equitable. He is right enough if we look only at the internal alterations in the income tax structure, but much less so if we consider the tax levers that have not been touched: the main bulk of the tax bill falls on wage earners and the middle classes. And the very literalness of his mention of VAT ? a hike in which, he says, is not among his intentions ? sounds suspiciously like a pre-announcement of a hike in the medium term.

Explanations on upcoming reforms (financial and labor market) are non-existent, excepting the emphatic (and laudable) refusal to create a "bad bank" at the taxpayer's expense; and the acceleration of his timetable, driven by the need to show seriousness to the markets and to our EU partners. But what is most disturbing is the total lack of specificity concerning stimulus measures to relaunch the economy, this being the other pillar which must complement the indispensable precondition of austerity: at the national level in Spain, and throughout the rest of Europe.