THE ONE AL QAEDA WIN:

Spain's Turmoil (Alejandro Bermudez, Headline Bistro)

Last Sunday, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that the government would hold firm on spending cuts that would mean the largest elimination of social benefits since the 1936 Civil War. These include cutting government salaries and retirees’ benefits, raising the retirement age, hiking taxes and eliminating all child benefits in a country with the lowest birth rate in Europe.

Zapatero himself has admitted that these policies, so unpopular that his own party-controlled unions have threatened a massive strike, could mean his political demise after six unexpected years in power. After all, he was only elected three days after the 2004 terrorist attacks on Madrid’s commuter train system that left nearly 200 dead, which resulted in his Socialist party promising to pull Spain out of the Iraq war.

Zapatero kept his promise of pulling Spain’s army out of Iraq, but his government, riding on an unprecedented economic windfall created by the opposing party, focused exclusively on social and moral issues.

Thus, in five years, the razor-thin Socialist majority in Congress passed laws that made divorce easier to obtain, legalized gay marriage and homosexual adoption, expanded the availability of abortion beyond any other European country and reduced financial support for families.

Although the opposition to such measures provoked the largest street demonstrations ever seen in Spain, the majority of Spaniards preferred to carry on with the secularist, happy-spending trend fueled by Spain’s real estate bubble.

When you have a declining population real estate is a bubble.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 27, 2010 6:10 AM