Angus MacSwan and Angus Berwick
Vanessa Sanchez, the mayor of this forlorn town Villanueva de la Torre on the plains of central Spain, is an angry and exasperated woman. She is working all hours of the day without pay to keep Villanueva de la Torre alive, she says.
A decade ago, Villanueva was full of young couples strolling with pushchairs and enjoying their new modern homes, built like an American suburb and bought on generous credit.
Then came Spain’s economic crisis. Banks closed in on mortgages, money ran out, and now neat rows of houses stand empty, their front windows bricked up, the streets deserted.
If Villanueva’s plight is emblematic of the broken dreams of a generation of Spaniards who came of age after the end of the Franco dictatorship, it also helps to explain the new political dynamic.
The old order that has long ruled is being challenged by younger forces channeling despair and disgust. Some people are talking about “The Second Transition”. “The political class in Spain is rotten,” said Sanchez, mayor since May and a leader of the grassroots Ahora Villanueva de la Torre party, which is affiliated to the new leftist Podemos party.
Health, education and social services had all been cut, she said in her office in the town hall, but politicians had not cut back their wages or their privileges. “But now is a new era,” Sanchez said. The next few weeks will see if that will indeed be the case.
In an inconclusive election last month, the conservative People’s Party (PP), which had ruled for the past four years took most parliamentary seats but lost its outright majority. Its support had ebbed over a slew of corruption scandals and austerity measures deployed to combat a long recession in the European Union’s fifth-largest economy.
The Socialist Party (PSOE), which has alternated in power with the PP since the transition from dictatorship in the late 1970s, came second but also with much reduced support. Two new parties, the anti-austerity Podemos and the centrist Ciudadanos, made strong showings on the back of the desire for change.
Now the parties are maneuvering to form a coalition government — a new concept on the national level — with acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy proposing a Grand Coalition with PSOE and Ciudadanos, while the Socialists want a “progressive coalition” of the left, which would mean a significant role for Podemos. A new election is also a distinct possibility.
“I’m very optimistic about the future, we have ended the system of two-party rule and we have presented an alternative,” Sanchez said. “But the path forward is not easy.”
Spain’s politics are now fractured in a way not seen since the early years of the transition from Franco’s rule. In that time, the country left behind its status as a backward and repressed corner of Europe to become a thriving democracy and enjoy a cultural renaissance.
It also suffered years of a Basque separatist war, now all but defeated. However, a strong push for independence by the Catalonia region, albeit non-violent, is also complicating the current scene.
CAUGHT OUT
Luciano Busto was one of those caught out in Villanueva. Lying about 50 km east of Madrid, it grew in size from 600 people in 2003 to almost 6,500 as developers built a dormitory town of chalets and neat streets. Banks offered easy credit and homes were snapped up.
Busto bought a four-bedroom house with his partner for 300,000 euros with 200,000 euros in credit from Spanish bank Bankia. He worked as an administrator in a metal company and as an actor.
But he was put out of work when the company closed in 2008. He opened a shop but after a few years of struggle he “lost everything”.
His partner also became unemployed and returned home to Ecuador, suffering from cancer. When he failed to pay his mortgage for the third month in a row in 2013, Bankia began to foreclose. He is trying to delay the house’s auction and refuses to give back the keys to Bankia until it provides him somewhere else to live.
A spokesman for Bankia said eviction was “always the last and most desperate solution” and the bank did its utmost to avoid such an outcome.
In all 54 families are facing eviction in Villanueva and a typical house price has dropped from 350,000 euros to 130,000 euros in what is known as Spain’s most heavily-mortgaged town.
Busto, 48, is now involved with Stop Desahucios, a group that fights foreclosures, and lives with his mother. “In every city there are two Spains,” he said. “It is a divided country.”
He saw the entrenched political elite as a lingering legacy of the Franco era. “Rooting out corruption will take a long time,” he said. Busto has found part-time work as a drama teacher in Madrid but unemployment in Villanueva runs at 33 percent — above the national rate of 21 percent.
HEADS IN THE 21st CENTURY
Unemployment has been a huge reason for the despair of the past few years. Although the figures have improved recently, a “Lost Generation” poses a long-term problem. Young Spaniards, many of them with university degrees, have left Spain in their thousands to find work overseas, a good number holding down such jobs as bar staff in London.
One who stayed is Dani Aguilera, a 26-year-old barber and musician in Madrid. He was born nearly a decade after the 1981 coup attempt that marked the last throw of the dice of Francoist military men, and grew up in the good times.
But Spain is going through a tense period again, he said. “There are still people with the old way of thinking. The old political parties — the truth is, they are not in the 21st century. We need people with their heads in the 21st century.”
Aguilera earns about 700-800 euros per month working 20 hours a week at a barbershop by Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. At night he works as a singer, performing a fusion of rap, flamenco and blues with lyrics that tell of daily life and hardship.
Chatting before a show at the Bar Calvario in Lavapies — an area that is home to young artists and Arab and African immigrants — he also bemoaned the corruption. “There is no punishment, no one goes to jail,” he said.
He explained Spain’s decline lyrically.
“When you have that first drink, you don’t worry about things. But if you have too much, you get drunk. Then you have a hangover.”
BROAD IMPULSE
The fraught environment is also causing consternation in other sectors. Businessman Agustin Maiz, 50, summed up the state of Spanish politics in one word: “Mierda” (Crap).
The current uncertainty was damaging to business, said Maiz, 50, who owns a company manufacturing heat exchangers and described himself as a libertarian. “My impression is that unless we find a stable political situation, it will be hard. Everyone is stopping investments, everyone is cautious. People are scared,” he told Reuters.
A leftist government could be dangerous and previous Socialist administrations had spent vast amounts of public funds, he said. But even that would be preferable to unending instability.
Maiz wanted to see labor reforms. The costs of firing inefficient workers were crushing and he would be happy to pay good new workers more. But such laws “are tattooed into the Spanish mentality,” he said.
The new impulse comes not only from the left. The business-friendly Ciudadanos, offers a less clench-fisted alternative. “The first transition took us from dictatorship to a political system dominated by two strong parties,” said Ignacio Aguado, a 32-year-old former lawyer who now sits in the Madrid Assembly. “What we want now is a second transition that bases the system on people, not parties.”
Podemos’ rise was based on indignation fueled by a desire for radical change, he said. Ciudadanos was more rational. The new era would require parties reaching agreements and building coalitions, something that is common elsewhere in Europe but unusual in Spain, he said.
Some coalitions have already been formed at a municipal and regional level. Ciudadanos and the PP have a pact in Madrid. “There is a new generation of politicians that are tired of what they have seen over the years. Spain’s democracy has matured a lot over the last 30 years but we demand better. “What we propose is to correct the mistakes, not start again and return to the 1980s.” — Reuters
