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MADRID: The Spanish Chaos
Monday, 08 February 2010 11:01
Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort
There is chaos in the Spanish Administration. There is much chaos in the ranks of Premier Zapatero and his cabinet. Zapatero's widely unpopular cabinet, beginning with his two female Vice Presidents Maria Teresa Fernández de la Vega and Elena Salgado and his male Vice President Manuel Chaves and ending with the unimportant Minister of Equality Viviana Aído or Minister of Housing Beatriz Corredor Sierra, and the unprepared Minister of Labour Celestino Corbacho.
On 7 April 2009 Premier Zapatero reformed his cabinet with the entry of Vice President and Minister of Finance Elena Salgado and Vice President Manuel Chaves. The major shift of positions turned the cabinet from more to less pragmatic and from less to more political. Elena Salgado had previously held the posts of Minister of Health and Minister of Public Administration and was appointed Minister of Finance after the solid Pedro Solbes left in serious discrepancy with Premier Zapatero about economic structural reforms that the Leon-born Premier has refused to acknowledge until recent times. Minister Salgado was ranked the European Union's fourth worst Minister of Finance by the Financial Times on 16 November 2009 out of a total of 19 Ministers. The previous year the then Minister of Finance Pedro Solbes was ranked Europe's third best.
The European Union Commissioner for Economic Affairs and former Spain's Minister of Labour and Spain's Opposition Leader Joaquín Almunia included Spain along with Portugal and Greece in the club of Europe's most problematic countries. Minister Salgado did a disservice to her fellow Spaniards discrediting the fair and accurate opinion of her formerly Socialist fellow Almunia, who is only pointing in the right direction. Minister Salgado has been discrediting every other forecast on the Spanish economy coming from the International Institutions including the IMF and the OECD. By refusing to acknowledge the urgency of the situation she has been holding back the well-needed discussion on structural reforms that has only recently began to occur.
Vice President Teresa Fernández de la Vega is the strongest, most solid member of Premier Zapatero's cabinet. She is a hard-working, well-prepared technocrat with strong debating skills and a lack of communication charisma. She has entered the game of confusion in which different members of Premier Zapatero's cabinet say different things at different times regarding the forthcoming economic reform.
Vice President Manuel Chaves is the former President of the Autonomous Region of Andalusia in southern Spain. His role is questioned and considered redundant. Along with Vice President Chaves, Minister of Equality Viviana Aído and Minister of Housing Beatriz Corredor Sierra have played minor roles during Spain's ninth legislature. Socialist affiliate and President of Autonomous Region Castilla La-Mancha José María Barreda has only recently suggested that the Spanish Government should reduce its size and as a result eliminate unimportant Ministries such as Equality or Housing.
Celestino Corbacho has been Spain's Minister of Labour since 2008. From 1994 to 2008 the Extremadura-born Socialist politician was mayor of Hospitalet de Llobregat, a town in the whereabouts of Barcelona. He is a High School graduate without college education, a rather surprising outcome for someone in charge of seeking and proposing economic policy to reduce Spain's staggering unemployment rate of 19 percent.
Spaniards continue to remain desolated and have lost almost all hope in their political representatives. Spaniards demand change that could be brought on board by Premier Zapatero if he shuffled his cabinet in order to reduce its size and depolitize it with more pragmatic and technocratic profiles such as those of Maria Teresa Fernández de la Vega or Minister of Industry Miguel Sebastián, who holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota and was BBVA's chief economist.
Premier Zapatero's cabinet has been playing the game of denial vis a vis the economic crisis, since it turned mostly political in April 2009. The game of denial has turned into a blame game in which nobody is responsible for the current economic environment that is degrading one day at a time, nobody but those on the other side of the political spectrum, a side uncapable of proposing alternative economic policy making.
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