EURO CRISIS Spain maintains inventory

In Madrid, a little grumbles about the "austerity" in Berlin. The crisis forced the country to self-criticism.

As long as the euro crisis continues, one should not refer to Southerners as Spaniards. This could easily result in the roughened German public misunderstandings. Liederlich, irresponsible, unreliable, those are just some of the attributes with which we in this country occupies the south. Because it is better to speak of Spain as the country beyond the Pyrenees, which had been an empire in a long agony to relative insignificance and fell in the 20th Century almost four decades under the dictatorship of General Franco froze. After Franco's death, sought and found Spain to join Europe. It began an unprecedented, rapid ascent.

Since the country's accession into the European Union in 1986, doubled by the year 2009, the per capita income of the Spaniards. Spain and the EU - that we must not forget - is a success story that is now but an abrupt end. The Madrid government has asked banks for funding from Brussels, the EU's imminent intervention along the lines of Greece could. The question is whether Spain can find a way out of this crisis? It has the power and the conditions for this?

In difficult times, the temptation is great everywhere, looking for scapegoats. The overcome believed national stereotypes reinforce, in Germany like the lifestyle of "southerners" to the debt crisis blamed, and is "in the" southerners complained about the excessive hardness of Germany, the weaker economies drifting straight into the abyss.

The slogan: It will get worse before it gets better

The official Spain is comparatively reticent on this point. Angela Merkel with a Hitler mustache you look in vain in Madrid. One reason for this is that the Spaniards until November 2011, the conservative Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy and his ausstatteten with an absolute majority - Rajoy was already in the program, what Merkel called for: save, save, save. This was done out of conviction, not by outside pressure. The "realism", the one in Berlin demands of indebted countries, has long since established itself in Spain. There is no expectation that things will get better quickly.

600,000 jobs will be lost this year also. The government has announced. Their slogan: It will get worse before it gets better. How long can it be "" worse, without leading to social revolts, it can make no predictions. But so far is the incredibly high youth unemployment by the still-functioning family network are collected and, more recently, by emigration, for example, to Germany.

Are critical of the attitude of the government in Berlin is of course also in Madrid. "The markets do not believe in €. The euro is fundamentally a structural defects. This is the central problem, not Greece, not even Spain! ", Says José Ignacio Torreblanca of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Really, this argument may seem, it lends itself so well as the ability to deflect attention from their own inadequacies. The fears of the German government. Crisis countries such as Spain could be dismissed by pointing to the euro itself from responsibility.

A general crisis of capitalism



One can certainly hear in Spain, that without the financial crisis of 2008, everything would have been different, hence the Spanish crisis is mainly a consequence of the general crisis of capitalism. But such opinions are limited mainly to the group of "indignados" - the outraged that more than a year made the world public attention to themselves by demonstrating in central Madrid's Puerta del Sol to tens of thousands.

Then hung a whiff of revolution about Madrid, partly because the indignados compared the Plaza del Sol, with the Tahrir Square in Cairo to power and prestige to borrow from Arab Spring. Electoral reform, tax reform, combating corruption, financial transactions tax - these were the demands indignados. However, the Puerta del Sol is the hub of the great hopes quickly turned into a banal Alltagsort. Friends, lovers, hikers, tourists here are found in masses, while the indignados have migrated into the net or have retired in the peripheral parts of the city of Madrid, where they discuss it further. "15 M" is called the movement now, after 15 May 2011, where the protests began at the Puerta del Sol. 15 M tries in addition to all the fundamental debates about democracy and capitalism, which can lead to endless movement to assist those affected by the crisis counseling and legal assistance. It is classic, deserving grassroots work.

At work it is missing 15 M, because countless people are in debt, burdened with loans they can never pay back in their lives. Still, from 15M to date been no serious political force. Their arguments caught in the width of the society is not really. Because obviously it is still under the shock of their own gullibility, which is a central cause for the present plight.