FROM THE WELFARE STATE TO THE STATE OF NECESSITY

• by Guillermo Medina
• Monday, February 20, 2012
• Inter Press Service

The governing Popular Party (PP) is making it clear that it knows how to dominate the communications game and seize the initiative, writes Guillermo Medina, a journalist and writer, is ex-director of the newspaper "YA" , ex-deputy, and ex-president of the Defence Commission of the Spanish Congress.

In this analysis, the author writes that once in power, the PP used the 2011 budget gap (which turned out to be 8 percent of GDP instead of the projected 6 percent) to justify "the change of change" and raise taxes -though this budget jump had been widely viewed as inevitable and was mainly caused by bad management of the Autonomous Communities and the onset of the recession. Since then the PP government, far from downplaying the gravity of the problem, has done the opposite. Its intention is clear: the worse the people's view of the situation, the more resigned they will be to accept reforms without resisting -first and foremost "hard and deep" labour reform. Moreover, if Rajoy scares the daylights out of people at the beginning of his term, the blame will fall on the previous government.

The idea that necessity -and the necessity state- is here to stay is being drilled into the public consciousness and used to the advantage of a government that doesn't even try to hide its impotence in the face of the crisis and in fact renounces policymaking to please the nebulous entity we call the markets. Far from rebelling against the hegemony of the markets, the PP is using their power as a mantle to cover their own ineptitude and errors. And if some protest that this is degrading to democracy itself, the PP counters that we are all guilty of causing the current crisis by living beyond our means, thus shifting responsibility from the few who in fact caused the current crisis to the society at large.

(*) Guillermo Medina, a journalist and writer, is ex-director of the newspaper "YA" , ex-deputy, and ex-president of the Defence Commission of the Spanish Congress.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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