To win elections and be able to govern, leaders promise and gesture too much. True, a candidate does not aspire to the Nobel Prize in Economics and should not be oblivious to social impulses. Felipe González, a good president, promised in 1982 to create 800,000 jobs. They were not created – not even remotely – in that legislature, but he wanted to win. Y Macron has an interior minister –Darmarin– for which security is closely linked to strict immigration control. He does not want the extreme right, which already has 89 deputies, to climb positions.
But distinguishing between attention to problems that concern opinion and slide down the populist slope it’s not always easy. What does Feijóo do when he says that revising sedition is going against the Constitution and thus justify the non-renewal of the Judicial Power Council? More worrying is that the slip is not from a candidate, but from the Prime Minister.
When Sánchez asks for more public resources to protect Spain from the crisis is in tune with the IMF. Voucher. And since protection cannot be increased just by capping the price of gas or issuing debt – Italy, Spain and France have too much – the temporary tax on energy companies is understandable with “benefits fallen from the sky & rdquor ;. The conservative president of the Brussels Commission also believes it reasonable.
But pretend that in a single market Spain contradicts European uses It has many risks. And it happens both with the tax on large fortunes and with the extraordinary tax on banking. That the rich show solidarity in the face of the crisis is correct. But for something it will be that the wealth tax does not exist in any country of the euro. Because it is forcing to pay for something that has already been taxed (double taxation) and because it affects, for example, the shareholders of companies that do not distribute dividends (more possible in those that are not listed on the stock exchange). Y it is a tax that Zapatero abolished and that it did not recover until the great drop in public income due to the 2008 crisis. Is it now appropriate to aggravate it, when there are also many rich people who can avoid it?
Let’s go to the extraordinary tax on banks. The idea may be popular when Santander, BBVA and Sabadell announce that their profits have increased by 25%, 45% and 92% respectively in the first nine months of this year. But they are not “fallen from the sky”, because the ECB maintained abnormally low interest rates to fight the crisis and because many come from the decline in provisions for bad loans. And the types of liabilities (which banks pay for deposits) will have to rise and delinquencies may resurface. And the ECB has already put an end to the extraordinary liquidity auctions that encouraged bank loans.
The ECB believes that the good economic performance requires strengthening the capital of banks, conditioned by profits, and that the increase in costs –including taxes– must be passed on to customers (the opposite of what is intended here). Is the ECB meddling? In any case, not always in favor of the bank, because the chairman of Société Générale, a large French bank, Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, complains in writing that the ECB wants to be at the meetings of the Board of Directors. The ECB believes that the banks are key and fears unwelcome interference.
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That is why Sánchez is wrong when he criticizes a key institution that also has 400,000 million in Spanish debt. Do you remember that Hillary Clinton was cautious with China Why, he said, shouldn’t you anger the US banker?
And it’s more absurd attack against the Spaniard who is in the Executive Committee (six people) of the ECB. All countries: France (Lagarde), Germany (Isabel Schnabel), Italy (Fabio Panetta)… they want to be there and the president disqualifies Luis de Guindos because he was Rajoy’s Minister of Economy. Spain has two valuable politicians (Borrell and Guindos) on the European command bridge and attacking them for reasons of internal politics (or believing that Guindos acts in the ECB like Sánchez in Moncloa) indicates that the president, who legitimately wants to win the next elections, confuses this objective with what is convenient for Spain. A serious mistake because his first duty is to govern.